The Choice
by lastincurableromantic
Summary: After GitF, the TARDIS brings the Doctor, Rose and Mickey back to Earth to solve an emergency involving the TARDIS herself. But when they see a familiar face, the face of someone who should not exist, they realize the crisis is much deeper than they thought and is one that could endanger the Doctor's very existence. Nine/Rose, Ten/Rose
1. Prologue

**a/n: This story is very much a work in progress that I wasn't intending to post yet, but I found I couldn't resist. I intend to post once a week, no more than that, at least until I have a lot more finished. **

**Please note this story will be rated M for adult situations and portions with a lot of swearing.**

* * *

**The Choice**

**Prologue**

Six months ago…

_Fire. Searing heat. An inferno of red and yellow and orange rushing through the deep red grasses of the plains. Red flames igniting the trees. The delicate silver leaves ablaze, turning the trees into torches that illuminated the night sky._

_Screams. Running. _

_Monstrous metal creatures of silver and black with glowing eye stalks. Shooting beams of energy. Killing everything in sight._

_"Exterminate! Exterminate!"_

_Disjointed faces. Circling, swirling in front of his eyes. Voices. Echoing…_

_An elderly man. Straight white hair. Beaky nose._

_"One day I shall come back. Yes, I shall come back..."_

_Dark, straight hair. An expressive face._

_"Jamie, stay with me, don't wander off."_

_White hair. Piercing eyes._

_"Courage isn't just a matter of not being frightened, you know. It's being afraid and doing what you have to do anyway."_

_Brown curls. Floppy hat. Lots of teeth._

_"Just touch these two strands together, and the Daleks are finished... Have I that right?"_

_Straight blond hair. A young face. Pleasant features._

_"Brave heart, Tegan."_

_Blond curls. Haughty, arrogant. Filled with righteous indignation. _

_"Power-mad conspirators, Daleks, Sontarans, Cybermen - they're still in the nursery compared to us. Ten million years of absolute power. That's what it takes to be really corrupt."_

_Dark hair. A Panama hat._

_"Every great decision creates ripples. Like a huge boulder dropping in a lake. The ripples merge and rebound off the banks in unforeseeable ways. The heavier the decision, the larger the waves, the more uncertain the consequences."_

_Dark curly hair. A grave expression._

_"It's not my war. I will have no part of it."_

_An elderly man. A warrior._

_"No more!"_

_Explosions. Fire. Fire everywhere. The ground on fire. The sky on fire. The sounds of screaming—_

_Suddenly cut off. Silence. The silence of space. The silence of the Void._

_The silence of the dead._

_Other images swam before his eyes. New faces. New voices._

_Plastic people. _

_A hand in his. A glimpse of blonde hair._

_"Run!"_

_"Are they students?"_

_"Nice to meet you… Run for your life!"_

_"The turn of the Earth… I can feel it. Now forget me…"_

_"It wasn't my fault! I couldn't save your world! I couldn't save any of them!"_

_Someone swinging on a chain, saving him. Another glimpse of blonde hair. A pretty face. Warm brown eyes and a generous mouth._

_"You were useless in there. You'd be dead if it wasn't for me."_

_"Yes, I would… Uh... I don't know... you could come with me." _

_"You could come with me…" _

_"You could come with me…"_

The feel of something repetitively poking him in the ribs drew him slowly back to consciousness. Gradually he realized he was lying face down on something hard. Rough. Asphalt. Cutting into the side of his face.

"Oi, mate. Wakey, wakey," said a male voice.

The poking became harder, more insistent. He opened his eyes a crack. Even that slight movement made his head pound. Despite lying horizontally, he was struck with a wave of dizziness and nausea.

"Come on, time to wake up." This was a different voice. Lighter, younger. Feminine.

He wondered where he was, and he opened his eyes wider. Someone, probably the person poking him, was shining a torch in his face. Through the glare, he could see a series of bins in front of him. Garbage lay on the ground around them, as if someone couldn't be bothered to actually lift up the lid of the bin and put it inside.

He turned his head. Black shoes led to black trousers led to radio equipped utility belts led to bright yellow rain slickers and black helmets. Police officers. One, the female—petite with dark brown skin and closely cropped hair—was looking at him with a frown, while the other, the male—large with a red, beefy face—was still prodding him with a baton.

"Ow," he complained.

"Sir, are you hurt?" the policewoman asked.

He groaned. _Now I am_, he thought.

"Sir, have you been mugged?" she asked.

"He hasn't been mugged, Seward," her partner said. "New Year's, unconscious in an alley, he's sleepin' it off. And now he needs to go home." The policeman turned back to him. "So you need to get up and go home, mate."

"I don't smell any alcohol on him, Rutgers," Seward told him.

"Doesn't mean anything," Rutgers said. "Alcohol, drugs… whatever he took, he needs to sleep it off at home, not in the alley."

"Shouldn't he go to A & E?"

"Not if he's not hurt," her partner replied. "And I don't see a mark on him."

As they spoke, he felt an overwhelming wave of drowsiness. His eyes drifted closed.

"Oi, don't go back to sleep!" Rutgers said, poking him again. "Wake up."

"Sir, can you tell us your name?"

He opened his eyes again. The policewoman, Seward, was kneeling over him now, concern written all over her face.

"Can you tell us your name?" she repeated. "Is there someone we can call?"

He opened his mouth to answer… and realized he didn't remember. Not whether he had any family, not where he was from, not how he had ended up in the alley. Not even his name. Nothing.

"Told you he was drunk," Rutgers said.

He couldn't argue with that. He didn't remember, so for all he knew he had been.

"Check his ID," the officer continued.

Seward reached forward as if she was going to check his pockets, and he held up a hand. Slowly he pushed himself up to a sitting position and patted down his jacket. All he could find was a slim wallet in an interior pocket. He handed it to her.

"Looks like he's… John Smith from Manchester," she said. She handed her partner the wallet.

"Manchester, eh?" Rutgers said. The officer examined its contents before handing the wallet back to him. "You're a long way from home."

He flipped open the wallet. Only one thing in it, a driver's license made out in the name of John Smith, Manchester, with the picture of a man with short cropped hair and a big nose and big ears. Him, he guessed. Otherwise there was nothing. No money, no credit card, no NHS card…

But there was something funny about the driver's license. For just a second, he could have sworn it was just a blank piece of paper…

"Yeah, guess I am," he replied. He put the wallet back in his pocket.

"So what's your story? Drunk or mugged?"

John tried to remember, but he couldn't. The name sounded familiar, but odd at the same time, like it could be his but really wasn't. But until he could figure out who he was, it was as good a name as any.

"If you were drunk, we could let you go with a warning," Rutgers continued. "But if you were mugged, we'd have to bring you in to file a report. Now which was it? Drunk or mugged?"

There was only one answer he could give. If they brought him in to file a report, he'd have to admit he didn't remember who he was, and that could mean a stint in the local psychiatric ward.

No. If he was sectioned, he'd never figure out who he was.

"New Year's," he said, remembering that the officer had mentioned it earlier. "Was celebratin'. Had a couple too many at the local and got pissed. Was on my way home, but obviously didn't make it."

Rutgers nodded sharply. "Right. We'll be on our way, then. And next time, make sure you head home before you're so drunk you can't walk."

He began to head out the alley, but Seward hung back for a moment.

"Are you going to be able to make it home all right?" she asked.

"Absolutely," he told her.

She nodded. John could tell she didn't believe him, but she stood and began to walk out of the alley anyway. Just before she left, he stopped her.

"Hey," he said impulsively. "What year is it?"

She stared at him. "It's 1 Jan, 2007. Are you sure you're alright?"

"Don't worry about me," he told her. "I'm fantastic. Absolutely fantastic."

She gave him another disbelieving look before turning and following her partner out of the alley.

John gave them a several minute head start before he stood up. His entire body ached, as if it had been pummeled repeatedly. Maybe he had been mugged after all, he thought. Without knowing where to go, he slowly staggered out of the alley, never noticing the tall blue box he was leaving behind.


	2. Chapter 1

**a/n: I want to thank the fantastic lunarsilverwolfstar over at tumblr and AO3 for her help with the Spanish. I told her approximately what I wanted to say, and she gave me more than I asked for. It was so brilliant that I couldn't bear to cut a single word. If you don't understand Spanish, you should be able to figure out what is said from context. **

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**Chapter One**

Present day…

_Long blonde hair. Big brown eyes. A generous mouth…_

John woke with a start to the sound of screaming coming from outside his window. Curses were being hurled back and forth, or maybe they were being volleyed. It was almost like a tennis match. The neighbors were rowing again. There was always someone rowing in this block of flats. This time it was the unmarried couple, Rita and Chuck, two over and one down.

He tried to get back to sleep, to recapture the elusive dream. He dreamt about a lot of things ever since he had woken up in the alley on New Year's. His dreams were strange and bizarre, all about alien planets and stars, about fire and war, about the color blue and gigantic pepper pots of all things. But he mostly dreamt about the girl. The girl's face haunted him for some reason, both when he was asleep and awake. He still didn't properly remember anything, not even his real name, but the girl was the closest to an actual memory as he came. Maybe he knew her from somewhere. He could almost recall what she looked like when he was awake, but not quite. But he could when he was sleeping. Her face was clearest to him in dreams. With thoughts of her, he began to drift off…

Rita let out a string of expletives in a variety of languages, and John was jerked awake again. For a second, as Rita shouted, he wondered if she had been in the navy. That was the only possible way she could have learned a few of those words, and how to pronounce them in exactly that way. She even used the right syntax.

John groaned as he glanced over at the clock. Half four in the morning. Too early for him to get up. Too early in fact for _them_ to be up. They were never up before eleven. This must be the tail end of whatever had been going on between them last night.

There was a lull in the arguing. Thanking all the gods of the Greek pantheon, he pulled the pillow back over his head and tried to get back to sleep again. A fool's errand, he realized, as Rita almost immediately began to swear again. That was followed by a loud crash. Soup pot against something hard and probably breakable by the sound of it. Not the window. That would have shattered. This was either the drywall or perhaps the door. The doors were thin, easily broken, particularly if it was an interior door. And as part-time maintenance man in return for a reduction in the rent, he'd probably be the one who'd have to fix it.

With a heavy sigh, he hauled himself out of bed, slipped on his jeans and a lightweight jumper, and headed out the door.

A crowd had gathered to watch the spectacle. There were people everywhere: on the balcony, on the landing, in the courtyard, even on the balconies of the other buildings.

"This is better than last night's EastEnders," he heard someone say as he headed down the stairs to the floor below.

"What isn't?" someone else replied. "Last night's episode was horrible."

With an eye roll, John pushed his way through the crowd to the arguing couple. Rita was standing in the doorway to her flat, clad only in a thigh length t-shirt and fuzzy slippers, while Chuck, standing against the railing, was dressed in a buttoned down shirt, jeans, and some sort of high-priced trainers. As John drew close to them, he got a whiff of cigs and stale beer coming from Chuck's general direction.

"Oi!" he shouted. "Knock it off!" At the sound of his voice the arguing couple both quieted for a moment, almost as if they hadn't realized they were the center of a spectacle. "Rita, Chuck, I'll thank you to save the domestics for a reasonable hour. Other people have to get up in the morning."

Rita tossed her long, black hair over her shoulder. "John," she said. "That… that…" Her dark brown eyes flashed angrily as she gestured at her boyfriend. She slipped into Spanish. "Este pinche hijo de puta que no vale nada esta dentrando a las cuatro de la mañana y el cabron ni tiene la dignidad que dar una buena escusa." She became more and more animated as she spoke. "¡Estoy segura que esta cogiendo una puta por ay!" She looked at her boyfriend in disgust. "Su verga ni esta tan grande para que todas estas putas se tiren en su camino."

"Más despacio, por favor," John replied in fluent and unaccented Spanish. "And in English this time. My Spanish is a bit rusty."

"This… piece of shit… has been shagging the waitresses down at the pub, I'm sure of it," she spat. "Then the bloody wanker has the nerve to come back here—at 4 am—and tell me it's all in my mind!"

John turned to Chuck, a young man whose pointed nose and greasy brown hair made him look a bit like a weasel. "Is this true? You been sleepin' around on her?"

"Yes, it is!" Rita interjected before Chuck could answer. "But why they'd bother with him, I have no idea. The son of a bitch can't even get it up half the time."

"Shut up, you slag!" he yelled. He lunged at her, and John caught him with one hand.

"Knock it off!" John ordered. Then he pulled a face as he caught a whiff of more than just beer and cigarettes. "What is that smell?" He took a big sniff and grimaced. "You definitely need a shower, for one thing. And for the second, unless you've taken to wearing women's perfume, she's right."

Chuck shook John's hand off his shoulder. "You've got it all wrong…" His voice trailed off and he didn't continue.

John raised an eyebrow. "Seriously. 'You've got it all wrong.' That's what you're goin' with?" He tapped his nose. "If there's one thing this nose is good for, it's smellin' shite, and I'm smellin' it now. And as for you," he said, turning back to Rita, "I don't know why you put up with him. If I were you, instead of throwing pots against the door, I'd be throwing his stuff out into the courtyard."

"She can't do that!" Chuck protested.

"Oi! I'm talking here!" John said to him. He turned back to Rita. "I'd toss him and his sorry arse out onto the street. You shouldn't put up with that kind of behavior."

"He's right," said an old woman who lived next door. She was wearing a floor-length dressing gown patterned with sunflowers, and her snow white hair was pinned up in pin curls. "I threw my second husband out for that and never looked back. Or was it my third…"

"It was your third, Gladys," her sister answered. She was dressed almost identically in a floral dressing gown, only hers had daisies. She wore her steel grey hair loose around her shoulders. "Remember? He was the one who you told me always ate crisps in bed."

"You're right, Irene," Gladys answered. "My second one was the one who—"

"Anyway," John interjected before the women could continue to reminisce. "You," he pointed to Chuck, "shut the hell up and find somewhere else to be, and you," he pointed to Rita, "stop yelling and throwing things. And the rest of you lot, go back to your flats. I'm headed back to bed, and I don't want to hear another word out of any of you."

He glared at the crowd for good measure, and slowly they trailed off. With another glare at Rita and Chuck, John returned to his own flat.

Back in his bedroom, he stripped down to vest and pants and crawled back into bed. But he couldn't sleep. _Damn_, he thought, getting back out of bed after tossing and turning for almost half an hour. _Might as well get up_.

After showering, he stared at himself in the mirror. For a split second for some odd reason he had expected to see a different face. "You're definitely losin' it," he said to his reflection. He considered shaving and then decided against it. _Why bother_, he thought. He had just shaved yesterday. Besides, no one cared what he looked like. Not even him.

He returned to the bedroom. As he dressed, this time in a denim work shirt rather than a jumper, his eye caught the notebook and the sketchpad that he kept on the bedside table. He'd been trying to record images of his dreams, see if by analyzing them that he could somehow trigger his memories, but so far it hadn't helped. He had drawn rough sketches of metal men and spaceships and disjointed faces, but most often he drew the blonde girl from his dreams.

He sat down on the edge of the bed, picked up the sketchpad and a pencil and began to work on the drawing he had started the day before.

Long blonde hair, big brown eyes, a wide smile… Her nose. He couldn't quite remember what her nose looked like. Cute, he thought. Feminine. Nothing like the hawkish beak he'd been born with.

He sketched in a smallish nose. Dissatisfied with the results, he erased and began again. Still not right. He frowned. Maybe work on her ears. Her ears… smallish, well, smaller than his at any rate. Then again, whose weren't?

And for the next two hours he worked on a sketch of a girl he couldn't remember ever having met before. But a girl, if she was real, who could possibly hold the key to whoever he was.

~oOo~

Mickey Smith sat on the jump seat in the TARDIS control room watching the Doctor at the mushroom shaped console in the center of the room. He was programming in their next destination: an alien planet, he had promised. One with a purple sky and green clouds and the best food this side of the galaxy. It might have been interesting, if he hadn't been talking about it for fifteen minutes straight without taking a breath.

Bored with listening to his rambling monologue, Mickey glanced over at Rose. She stood nearby, leaning against one of the coral struts that stretched from the floor to the arching ceiling high overhead. Her arms were crossed, face carefully schooled to be completely expressionless. Having known her since childhood, and even dated her for a short time, Mickey knew that expression well. She was upset. But not the kind of upset that would result in a row. No, she was hurt. And he knew exactly why.

Ever since they had left the spaceship that had held portals to eighteenth century France, the tension between the Doctor and Rose had been so thick you could cut it with a knife. Oh, they were both ignoring it, pretending it didn't exist, but neither of them were fooling him, or each other.

"Rose," the Doctor said, "come here for a moment." As she moved to stand next to him, he gestured at the controls in front of her. "Hold this button down while I begin the materialization process."

With a small nod she silently obeyed.

Mickey wished she'd just yell, slap him, throw things… just something, anything rather than being quiet like this. This wasn't the Rose Tyler he knew.

Oh, this is bad, he thought. The last time he had seen her at this way was…

The TARDIS gave a sudden lurch and an ominous sounding bell began to toll. Its deep bong bong bong echoed through the TARDIS so loudly that Mickey could feel the reverberations in his bones. The Doctor lunged at the controls, and Mickey saw something on the Doctor's face he had never seen before: panic.

"What? What is it? What's goin' on?" he shouted.

"Somethin' bad, Mick," Rose shouted back.

"That's the Cloister Bell. Only rings in dire circumstances. Looks like we're gonna have to put off your visit to the Rhomulian cluster a little bit longer," the Doctor said loudly, trying to be heard over the sound of the bell.

The TARDIS shook violently and jerked to a sudden stop. Rose and the Doctor, who had been hanging onto handholds built into the control panels, were thrown against the console. Mickey hurriedly grabbed onto the edge of the seat, barely preventing himself being flung to the floor.

The Doctor and Rose rushed out the TARDIS door. Mickey trailed behind, bumping into Rose who had stopped short. Behind them the Cloister Bell fell silent.

The TARDIS had landed on the pavement of a deserted city street. Its back was flush against a tall graffiti covered fence surrounding a dilapidated building, while across the street was a vacant lot, filled with weeds, abandoned car parts, empty beer cans, and other, less appealing things. Tall concrete buildings less than a block away loomed overhead, whereas in the distance, they could hear the sounds of city traffic and of a radio blaring rock music. They all immediately recognized where they were.

"Is this some sorta joke?" Mickey asked.

"We're on the Estate," Rose exclaimed in disbelief. "What are we doing here?"

"I don't know," the Doctor answered. He was walking around in a circle, staring in puzzlement at their surroundings. "And this is no joke. The Cloister Bell doesn't ring for no reason."

"Well, it looks pretty peaceful to me," Mickey said. "No plastic people walking the street, no alien ships overhead. So where's the big emergency?"

"I don't know!" The Doctor snapped. He turned and strode back into the TARDIS. Rose shrugged, and she and Mickey followed him.

Inside, the Doctor was squinting at a display screen covered with the circles and other geometric shapes that Mickey knew was the written form of the Doctor's own language. Muttering under his breath, he pulled his glasses out of a pocket and put them on. He shook his head.

"I don't get it. The TARDIS says that the emergency is here, in this place and time, and what's more, involves the TARDIS herself." He moved closer to the screen and his forehead furrowed. "And me," he said in surprise. He took off his glasses, shoved them back in his pocket and turned to them.

"Well, we can't leave here until we figure out what's going on," he said irritatedly. "Rose, why don't you and Mickey look around a bit, see if there's anything going on out there while I examine the TARDIS a bit more."

Rose stared at him for a moment and then bit her lower lip, a gesture Mickey recognized as meaning she was nervous, but he couldn't imagine why: they were on the Estate.

Then the penny dropped.

"You're leavin' us here, aren't you?" he accused. "Just like you did with Sarah Jane. You're tryin' to trick us into leavin' the TARDIS, and then you're just gonna take off."

The Doctor's jaw dropped, and he gaped at them. "Is that what you think?" He turned to Rose. "Both of you? You think this is just some ploy to abandon you here?" Rose didn't answer. "But I told you…" He stared at her. "I am not leaving you behind. Even if I wanted to—which I don't," that part was accompanied by a shake of his finger at both of them, "I wouldn't be able to, because with the TARDIS in the state she's in, she wouldn't take off anyway."

He fell silent. He searched Rose's face and looked troubled at what he found there. "Mickey, would you excuse us for a minute, please?"

Mickey looked at Rose, who nodded. As he left he caught snatches of their conversation.

"Honestly, Rose, how could you think—"

"Seriously? How could I think anything else after you—"

Evidently he had been wrong, Mickey thought. They were going to row.

With a small smirk of satisfaction, Mickey shut the door behind him to give them some privacy.

~oOo~

When Rose left the TARDIS a few minutes later, Mickey was waiting for her.

"So?" he prompted.

She didn't answer. Instead she stalked off down the street. Mickey had to jog to catch up with her.

"What happened?" he asked. "What did he say?"

"Don't want to talk about it," she told him. She didn't look at him. "Just need to get out of there for a bit."

"This isn't the way to your mum's," he said. "And it's not the way to my flat either. So where are we headed?"

"I… I don't know," she said. She came to a stop and turned to him. "I don't want to face Mum right now, and I don't want to go back to the TARDIS either."

"Alright," he said, thinking fast. "I have an idea. He was gonna take us to eat, and he didn't. Let's go ourselves then. Leave him here to do… whatever the hell he doin' in there."

"Mick…" Rose said. "I'm not really hungry."

"Well, I am," he told her. "So we're goin'." And with that, he took her arm and pulled her down the street.

Ten minutes later they were sitting at a small table at the back of Mickey's favorite pub on the Estate, a table they had been very lucky to get. When they had arrived, they had discovered it was Saturday at lunchtime and the place was packed. As was typical, on the telly that was over the bar there was a game on, but for once Mickey wasn't trying to keep sight of it. Instead, unlike every time they had gone to the pub while they had been dating, he was entirely focused on Rose.

"Honestly, Rose, I don't know why you let him treat you like that," he said.

"He doesn't treat me any different than anyone else," she told him.

"And that's part of the problem. He should," Mickey said. "Besides, he didn't treat that fancy French bint that way."

"He had to save her," she said. "This is what he does."

At this Mickey rolled his eyes.

"Seriously, Mick. Those robots weren't supposed to be there. And I looked her up. She was really important in France's history, influenced the revolution and stuff. If it wasn't for her, who knows what would have happened. It's his job to fix things like this."

"Was it his job to snog her? And then brag about it? He threw it in your face, Rose. Not to mention the fact that who knows what the two of them got up to while he left us on the ship. He treated you like crap. Shitty boyfriend he turned out to be. Almost as bad as Jimmy."

Rose gave him a look that said _don't go there_. "I told you, Mick, we aren't like that. We're just friends. Who he snogs is none of my business."

"'We aren't like that, Mick,'" he said mockingly. "'We're just friends, Mick.'"

"We are!" she insisted.

"Yeah, right. Pull the other one while you're at it. If you're just friends, I'm the Queen."

"Nice to meet you, your Majesty."

They were interrupted by a waiter carrying a heavily laden tray. Big baskets of deep fried cod and chips were placed on the table in front of them along with by tall pints of light gold cider. Mickey immediately tucked in, eating with gusto, shoving huge forkfuls of food in his mouth. Meanwhile, Rose picked at the basket in front of her.

"Let's just say I believe you," Mickey said around a mouthful of food. "Which I don't. But even if I did, he still abandoned us on that spaceship."

"Mickey, he told me straight off, on one of our very first trips, that it was a new morality out there. I had to get used to it or go home."

He shook his head and stared at her. "So that's it then? Get used to it or go home? And you're okay with that?"

"It's worth it. Getting a chance to see what's out there… it's worth it," she said.

"Rose, he abandoned us on that ship. Not just you. Us. We almost got killed by those robot things while he was off gettin' drunk."

"He didn't know—"

The crowd in front of the telly let out a cheer, but neither of them paid attention.

"Maybe not," Mickey said, raising his voice loudly enough to be heard. "But that's not the point. You might be able to live with that, but I can't. So if I have to get used to it or go home, I guess I should go home." His eyes widened, as if he was shocked at the words that had come out of his mouth.

She blinked. "You're… you're gonna stay here?"

"I, uh, I guess I am," he said.

Rose bit her lip. She hadn't initially wanted Mickey to come with, but now that he wasn't going to travel with them anymore, she realized she didn't want him to leave. "I… I can't stay," she said.

"I know."

"I'm gonna keep traveling with him as long as he'll let me. I can't imagine anything that would make me want to stay here." She looked up to see him frowning at her. "I'm sorry, Mick. I didn't mean…"

"No," he said. "We talked about this before. It's been over between us for a while. It's been over since that first day the two of you met, probably. Just one question though. Are the two of you really just friends?"

She nodded. "Yeah. Just friends."

"Seriously?"

"Seriously."

"Why?"

"What do you mean, 'why'?" she asked.

"I mean, it's obvious how much he cares about you, and I know how you feel about him…" he said. "Wait a minute. Does _he_ know how you feel about him?"

"Yeah. Maybe… I don't know." She shrugged. "But it doesn't really matter. He doesn't do that sort of thing."

"Oh, yes, he does," Mickey argued. "I think Reinette proved that."

She leaned across the table and slugged him in the arm. "'S not what I meant. He can, he told me he can… don't ask," she said, holding up a hand and cutting him off before he could say anything. "He just doesn't do… relationships. Too tough on him. He's lost so many people, he told me so, and I don't think he can bear to lose anyone else. Or maybe it's that he can't do relationships. Thing is, he's alien. He looks human, but he's not. He doesn't react the same way to things as we do, doesn't think the same way we do."

"What if he was human, Rose?" Mickey asked. "What then?"

She took a deep breath and let it out in a rush. "I don't know. But it doesn't matter. It's not gonna happen. It's not like he can just up and turn himself human. And why would he want to anyway?"

Mickey didn't have an answer to that.

Another loud cheer came from the front of the pub, and this time he strained his neck to try and see the match over Rose's head.

"Go ahead," she said indulgently. She jerked her head towards the television. "Might as well get caught up."

Mickey grinned. "You're the best, babe," he said, picking up his basket and cider and carrying it to the bar.

With a sigh, she sprinkled more vinegar on her food and speared a chip with her fork. It was only halfway to her mouth before he was back.

"You gonna eat your fish?" he asked. He didn't bother waiting for a reply, just grabbed it with his fingers and put it in his basket.

She rolled her eyes. "Not anymore," she replied.

He grinned and gave her a kiss on the cheek before returning to the bar.

~oOo~

Later, after they had both finished eating and, more importantly, when the match was over, Mickey and Rose wandered back out onto the street.

"So you're really gonna do this then?" she asked. "You're really gonna stay?"

"Yeah, I think so," he said. "I mean, it's exciting an' all, the aliens, the adventures, the runnin' for your life, but it just doesn't do it for me like it does for you."

"It's not always like that, Mick," she told him. "There's lots and lots of times when we're just traveling, just going new places, seeing new things. Like that planet he was going to take us to." She bumped his shoulder with hers. "Come on with us when we go. You'll see."

After a moment, Mickey shook his head. "My flat is still here. I'm gonna go see if I can get my old job back. After all we've only been gone, what, a day or two?"

They rounded a corner and stopped in shock when they saw the shop. It looked different somehow, newer almost. The sign in front had received a fresh coat of paint and the plate-glass windows were sparkling. From where they stood, it looked like the repair bays of the garage were full. The tiny car park next to the shop was filled, as was the street in front.

"Wow, I've never seen it so busy," Mickey said in amazement. "For sure I'll get my job back."

Rose didn't mention her suspicions that the changes that had taken place had to have taken more than a day or two to make.

The inside of the shop was as packed as the outside. Cars were indeed in every bay, and the waiting area in the office was packed with people. They made their way to the reception desk where the receptionist was on the telephone.

The receptionist/bookkeeper/office manager was Abhirati Mudali, the wife of the owner. Her name—which could be loosely translated as mother of five hundred children—suited her, as they had five children at home and appeared to have a sixth on the way. And very soon by the look of her.

"Mrs. Mudali," Mickey said. "Where's Mr. Mudali?"

"I don't know," she replied crossly. "Somewhere in there." She gestured vaguely with her hand at the interior of the garage.

"Can we go find him?"

She shrugged. "You can try," she said. As they turned to leave, she called after them. "And if you do manage to find him, tell him we need more help here unless he wants to have this one born in the office rather than in hospital!"

Like the office, the garage itself was also a study in chaos. People were everywhere. As Mickey searched for his former boss, Rose trailed along behind him. It was either that or go back to the TARDIS or go to her mum's flat, and she really wasn't in the mood to see either the Doctor or her mum yet. As much as she had protested to Mickey that she wasn't upset by the business with Madame de Pompadour, it did bother her that the Doctor had been so quick to leave them behind on the spaceship. Not to mention how much it hurt that he had asked Reinette to go on a trip with them. She'd never forget the look on his face when he found out she had died waiting for him. As much as he denied it, she knew he had been crushed.

The business with Reinette following immediately after running into Sarah Jane just drove home the point to her that she was merely one in a long parade of people—women—in his life. And despite his claims she was different, that he'd never leave her behind, the truth was he _had_ left her behind, her and Mickey both, almost immediately after that. That told her that not only was she just one of many, she wasn't even an important one.

She tamped down the jealousy that was again threatening to overwhelm her. She had always been jealous of the attention he had shown other women, right from the very first, starting with Jabe at the end of the Earth. But her feelings for him weren't the reason she was staying with him. That part of what she had told Mickey was the truth. Reinette had had it backwards. The Doctor wasn't worth the monsters. The chance of traveling the stars in the TARDIS was worth whatever she had to put up with with him.

But she still wasn't ready to face her mother right now. Her mother had a way of knowing what she was feeling by just looking at her, and she didn't want to risk it all coming out.

All of a sudden she realized that she had lost track of Mickey. She looked around. She recognized a couple of the mechanics she had known from when she had been dating Mickey. There were a couple of others she didn't know, and then there was the one that had his head buried under the bonnet of a midnight blue car she recognized as a Vauxhall of some type. His dark jeans and heavy work boots looked vaguely familiar somehow, as did the shape of his back as he was bent over the engine, but there was really no way of knowing who he was unless she got a closer look.

Finally she spotted Mickey, deep in conversation with his old boss. She made her way across the room. Since she didn't want to disturb them, she stopped before she actually joined them, but she still made sure she was within earshot.

"Please?" Mickey was begging. Neither of them seemed to notice her, which suited her just fine.

"I'm sorry," Mr. Mudali said. "You were gone three months—"

"Three months?" Mickey asked in astonishment.

"And I couldn't wait any longer. I hired someone else, a brilliant mechanic. He's the reason that we're so busy. People come all the way from Ealing to have him look at their cars. One even came from Reading. We're doing so well I'm even thinking of expanding, having him take over here while I open a new shop across town." Mudali paused thoughtfully. "We might be busy enough to take on another mechanic part time. I'll let him decide. And you know he's another Smith, in fact. Maybe you two are related." Mudali laughed. "Hey, Manchester, come here! There's someone I want you to meet."

"Oi, I'm busy here!" the man shouted back. Even muffled by the rest of the sounds of the garage, as well as his head being halfway in the engine, it was obvious he had a strong Northern accent.

"Who's in charge, eh?" Mudali snapped. "You come when I tell you to come."

With an irritated groan the man stood up and turned towards them. Rose's breath caught and her heart skipped a beat. She walked up to join Mickey, who was gaping at the sight of the mechanic.

"It can't be," he said in a low voice. "'S just someone who looks like him a bit, is all. You can't really tell under all that hair."

Rose didn't answer, still staring in shock at a prominent nose and overly large ears, features that—despite being hidden behind slightly too long hair and an unshaven face—she knew as well as her own. Her heart began to beat again, pounding wildly, almost painfully, in her chest.

"It can't be him," she whispered. "It can't be. I saw him change myself."

As the man crossed the room to join them, he stumbled over a large spanner that had been left in the middle of the floor.

"Oi!" he shouted to the room at large. "Who's the stupid ape who left this lying here?"

"Oh my God," Rose murmured. "It's him. It's really him. It's the Doctor."


	3. Chapter 2

**a/n: Recognizable dialogue from the episode _Rose_.**

* * *

**Chapter Two**

John crossed the garage, following the sound of his boss's voice and still mumbling about stupid apes and their carelessness in leaving things lying around.

He finally spotted Mudali near the office. He appeared to be with someone, a young man, but he barely noticed either of them when he saw a flash of blonde hair. The young woman it belonged to was rapidly retreating into the office.

Something about the hair triggered memories of his dreams.

_Blonde hair. A hand in his. "Run!"_

A tiny voice inside his head told him it was a coincidence, there were millions of people in Greater London alone, and the likelihood that any particular blonde girl was the person that had been haunting his dreams was infinitesimal. That was assuming that the girl from his dreams was even real. Which she probably wasn't. But he couldn't take that chance. Before he could stop himself, he rushed past them and into the office.

The room was filled to overflowing with people waiting for their cars to be finished. He glanced around. There was no one at the desk and the girl, whoever she was, didn't appear to be there. He rushed out through the glass door to the street.

She wasn't there.

The street was filled with people. Typical Saturday afternoon. It was possible she was there and he just didn't see her, he reminded himself. It wasn't as if she was particularly tall.

But the street was crowded with shops, pubs and cafés. A Chinese Kitchen was directly across the street. A pizza parlor was down just a bit from there. There was a Tesco Express. A hair and nail salon. A launderette two blocks in the other direction, with a newsagent next door and the ubiquitous golden arches of a McDonalds next to it. She could have gone in any one of those or a dozen other shops.

John scanned the crowd again and suddenly spotted long blonde hair. He rushed across the street, ignoring the cursing of a driver he had cut in front of.

"Wait! Wait!" he shouted. He caught up to her and grabbed her arm. She turned angrily.

It wasn't her. It was an Asian girl with bleached blonde hair.

The girl cursed him out in two languages—English and Mandarin and how did he know that—before continuing down the street.

"Sorry," he said as she walked away. He sighed. "Where'd she go?" he said to himself.

After another minute or two of looking, he made his way back to the garage. Once in the office, he heard a toilet flush. Mrs. Mudali exited the small loo attached to the waiting room and waddled back to the desk.

"Abhirati," he said. "Did you see a blonde girl come through here a couple of minutes ago?"

"I've seen lots of blonde girls today, John," she told him. "But not for the last few minutes. What's her name?"

"I don't know," he answered. "That's part of the reason I'm looking for her. She might have come in with someone. A young black man."

"Doesn't narrow it down much," she said. "Besides the blonde hair, what did she look like?"

"Uh… I don't know," he admitted. "I didn't get a good look at her."

She looked at him sympathetically. "Sorry, John," she said. "I can't help you. I've seen so many people today I can't keep track anymore."

Disappointed, he walked back into the garage and joined his boss and the young man he was with. He scanned the area just in case she had returned.

"Where did you go?" Mudali asked.

"Just thought I saw someone I recognized," John told him. "But I couldn't find her." He turned to the other man. He also looked vaguely familiar but not in the way the girl had. Probably had seen him around the Estate, he thought, and returned to looking around the garage.

"John, I want you to meet someone," Mudali said. "This is the man you replaced. He is also a Smith. Mickey Smith."

"Nice to meet you, Ricky," John said absently.

"It's Mickey," the young man corrected.

"Sure it is," John replied. "'S what I said, isn't it?"

"No, you said—"

"That girl you were with…" John said to Mickey. "The one who ran off. Who was she?"

Mickey glanced at the office. "Uh…"

"You were with a girl," he said. "Who was she?"

"I wasn't with anyone. I dunno who she was," Mickey said quickly. Too quickly.

John scowled at him. "Thanks a lot, _Ricky_. You've been a lot of help." He turned to his boss. "You saw her, Mudali. Who was she?"

"I don't know," Mudali answered. "Just that I've seen her around."

He glared at them both. "Well, I've got a lot to do. If that's all, I'm going back to the Vauxhall." He stalked off.

"Excellent mechanic," Mudali said. "But lousy with people."

~oOo~

Rose rushed out of the mechanic's shop and darted around the corner. When she heard him come out the door, she hid behind some bins.

"Where'd she go?" she heard him say. She crouched lower, hoping he didn't spot her. He didn't.

After she was sure he had gone back inside, she ran back to the TARDIS. She burst through the door and saw the Doctor standing at the console peering into the monitor. The blue-green glow of the Time Rotor reflected off his thick, dark rimmed glasses and illuminated his pale, freckled face. After seeing his former self in the shop, it was almost a shock to see him standing there like that, pinstripes, artfully messy hair and all, and she realized she had half expected to see him looking like he used to and wearing a beat up leather jacket and jeans.

"You're here!" she said breathlessly.

"Of course I'm here," he said without looking up. "I told you I would be."

"No," she said. "You're here. You're_ already_ here."

He looked up at her, puzzled. "What?"

Mickey burst into the TARDIS. "You're here!" he said to the Doctor. Then he turned to Rose. "Where'd you go?"

"I couldn't let him see me," she told him. "I don't think he's met me yet. If he met me now, before he met me, he'd remember me later and it could cause a paradox or something."

The Doctor looked from Rose to Mickey and back again. "What?" he said again.

Both Rose and Mickey ignored him. "What about me? Him seeing me couldn't cause a paradox?" asked Mickey.

"No," she told him. "He wouldn't remember you. After all, he barely remembered you after he had met you. Even after the Nestene Consciousness had made a plastic copy of you, he barely remembered you existed."

Mickey whirled on the Doctor. "Is that true? You barely remembered me after you met me?"

"What?" the Doctor said again to Rose, ignoring Mickey. "What do you mean I'm here?"

"You're already here," Rose told him slowly as if she was talking to a small child.

"And you're working as a mechanic," Mickey added.

"What!"

"Okay, that's four 'what's'," Rose told him. "That's a lot, even from you."

The Doctor ignored that. "Okay, you're telling me that I'm already here… working at a mechanic's shop?"

"Yeah, mine!" Mickey said. "You took my job!"

"And it's not you," Rose told him. "It's… last you. I think before you met me."

The Doctor shook his head. "Not possible. I had just regenerated right before that. You were the first person I met, Rose. Had to be someone who just looked like me."

"That's what I thought at first," she said. "But he had your voice, same Northern accent and everything. And he called everyone in the garage 'stupid apes'."

"Does sound like me," the Doctor admitted.

"And he called me Ricky," Mickey added.

Rose snorted. "Really?"

"Don't laugh!" Mickey said. "But I'm not sure that it's before he met you. When you took off, first thing he did was take off after you. Then when he came back, he asked me about you. Wanted to know who the girl was that I was with."

"What did you say?"

"Nothin'," he told her. "Figured since you took off you didn't want him to see you, so I told him I wasn't with you. That's when he called me Ricky."

The Doctor's mouth twisted into a small grin as he tried not to laugh.

"'S not funny," Mickey protested. "I always hated it when you called me Ricky."

The Doctor cleared his throat and put a serious expression on his face. "Of course it isn't funny," he said. "But seriously, it's not me." He tapped his temple. "I'd know if it was me. Whenever I am close to another incarnation of myself, particularly if I meet myself, I get a bit of an echo."

Rose stared at him. "Does it happen often, you meeting yourself?"

"It's been known to happen," he said. "Once or twice. Or three times. Alright, four." He got a faraway look on his face. "Well, I say four…"

"Doctor!"

Rose's voice jerked him back to the present. "Anyway…" He stretched out the word to three times its normal pronunciation. "No echo, therefore not me. Not to mention that we were together basically that entire regeneration, Rose. Joined at the hip, you could say. I certainly wasn't here working as a mechanic during part of it."

Rose frowned. "Hang on," she said. "You said I was the first person you met after you regenerated?"

"Yeah."

"And we were together the whole time after that."

"Yeah…"

"But that can't be right. After I first met you, but before we were travelling, I was looking for you on the computer. I found this person, Clarence or Clifton or something… You remember, Mickey. You went with when I went to see him because you thought he was an axe murder."

"Clive," Mickey said.

"Yeah, that's right," Rose said. "Clive. Anyway, Clive had been researching you, had all these pictures of you, from the Titanic, from the Kennedy assassination, even from Krakatoa. And I wasn't in them. We didn't go those places. I just figured you had done those things before you met me."

Frowning, the Doctor shook his head. "I don't remember that. I don't remember doing any of that. Are you sure it was me in the pictures?" She gave him a look. "Yes, of course you are." He raked a hand through his hair, causing it to stand straight up, as he sank down on the jump seat. "Why don't I remember?" he said to himself. "First thing I did after I regenerated was I caught the tail end of a signal by the Nestene Consciousness and followed it down to Earth. I ended up at Henrik's…" he sighed, "found the electrician's body and then saved this person who had somehow managed to get cornered by a bunch of shop dummies." He grinned at her. "And the rest is history. We've been together ever since. Except…"

"Except?" Rose asked.

"No, I came straight back," he said to himself. "Yes, of course I did. Didn't I?"

"When? When did you come straight back?"

"After I left. After you turned me down the first time I asked. But…" His voice trailed off. "Is it possible I didn't come back straight away? No," he immediately answered himself. "But just in case…" He moved back to the console, typed in some commands and studied the results. He shook his head. "I'm the only Time Lord on this planet."

"Are you sure?" Mickey asked. "I mean there's a lot of people on this planet…"

The Doctor raised an eyebrow at him. "And only one Time Lord. Me. I just did a scan for Time Lords. According to this, there are no other Time Lords on the planet. And since there _are_ no other Time Lords, if the TARDIS had found one, which it didn't, it would be me.

"Not to mention that if I was here, the TARDIS would be, too, and there's no evidence that there's another TARDIS here. Although…" He rubbed the back of his neck thoughtfully. "If there was, it would explain a thing or two. Like why the TARDIS is insisting that there's a crisis here." He frowned and turned back to the monitor. "I've spent the past two hours running diagnostics on the TARDIS, but it didn't occur to me to look to see if there was another TARDIS in the area. After all, why should it? There aren't any other TARDISes."

The Doctor made some more minute adjustments to the controls. When he looked at the monitor again, his face became serious. He looked up at their expectant faces.

"What is it?" Rose asked.

"There is a very, very faint echo on the TARDIS data screen. As if there's another TARDIS powered down somewhere near here. I can't get an exact lock on her—only that she's somewhere in the London area, and fairly close by from the looks of this. But why would another TARDIS be here if I'm not?"

"If his TARDIS is here, then that could mean the person we saw is you."

He looked up at her. "Rose, there are no other Time Lords here," he said firmly. "No one other than me."

"But if he's you…"

He shook his head. "No. The only reading I'm getting is for me. _This_ me." He turned back to the view screen. "We need to find the other TARDIS, find out what's wrong with her, why she's powered down. Then maybe we can figure out what happened to me."

He strode out the TARDIS door. When he realized that Rose and Mickey hadn't followed, he stuck his head back inside. "Coming?"

~oOo~

"I don't get it," Mickey said in a low voice to Rose. They had been trailing behind the Doctor for ten minutes as he seemed to be wandering aimlessly through the Powell Estate holding his sonic screwdriver in front of him. Its tip was lit up in blue, and it was making a whirring sound as he waved it back and forth. "How's this gonna help him find the TARDIS?"

"He's scanning for alien tech," she answered.

"Actually I'm scanning for non-alien tech," the Doctor corrected. "My sonic screwdriver is Time Lord technology, as is my TARDIS of course, so the TARDIS isn't alien tech to my screwdriver. If I was scanning for alien tech, the sonic would be going off like a Guy Fawkes Night firework."

"Because human technology is alien to it?" Mickey asked.

"Nah," the Doctor responded. "I can filter that out. But do you have any idea how many things humans use that are based on alien technology? There's tablet computers and IPods and the microchips you put in pets…" He stopped short and his voice trailed off as he examined the readings on his screwdriver. Then he headed off again. "This way!"

He led them down a quiet street and around a corner to a main thoroughfare. After walking several blocks he turned again so they were headed back the way they had come. Finally after several minutes he stopped at a narrow alleyway. He turned and grinned at them. "Here we are," he said. "She's right down here."

"You're kidding," Rose said. "We've been walking twenty minutes and we're only around the corner from where we started!"

The Doctor looked around in surprise. "You're right. That's odd. Why didn't we end up directly here?"

"Who cares?" Mickey said. "Let's just get this over with." As he stomped down the alley, the Doctor and Rose exchanged glances. "You comin' or what?" he hollered crossly. Rose shrugged and they followed him.

The TARDIS was sitting at the blind end of the alley, surrounded on two sides by buildings and the third by ten foot chain link fencing. "Well, that's why we didn't come directly," the Doctor said, walking up to it. "No way to get here except the way we came." He pulled his key out of his pocket and put it in the lock. "That's weird."

"What's weird?" Rose asked.

"Door won't unlock," he said. He jiggled the key in the lock. "It won't turn. Rose, give me your key."

Rose pulled the long chain that held her TARDIS key out from under her top and over her head. She handed it to the Doctor, and he tried it in the lock. "Huh, yours isn't working either," he said as he handed it back to her. He tried his own key again. This time he received a shock. "Ow!" He shoved his injured finger in his mouth for a moment. "Hmm. The only time I've ever been locked out like this is…"

"Is when?" Rose asked.

He looked at her gravely. "When she's been damaged. She'll lock me out while she rebuilds herself."

"How long can that take?" Mickey asked.

The sound of his voice startled them, and they both jumped. Mickey shook his head in disgust. "You forgot I was here, the both of you."

"No, of course not," the Doctor said smoothly. "We knew you were there… sort of. Anyway, to answer your question, it really depends on how much damage has been done and what kind. Hours, days, weeks... months…"

Rose's eyes widened. "Months?"

"Yes," the Doctor admitted reluctantly. "But still, not my TARDIS! Well, it is my TARDIS, but from the past, or the future I suppose. But not my current one! That one is right where we left it. The real question is, is this a past TARDIS, or a future one?"

"And why is it here?" Rose asked.

"And if the TARDIS is here, where am I?"

"I'll tell you where you are," Mickey said. "Down at the shop, working as a mechanic."

The Doctor sighed the long suffering sigh of the put upon. "I told you. That isn't me. I scanned for non-human life forms, and there wasn't a trace of another Time Lord."

"I know what I saw," Mickey told him. "And more important, I know who I saw."

~oOo~

Later, back in their TARDIS's console room, the Doctor was fiddling with the controls while Rose and Mickey watched.

"Now if that was a future TARDIS, this won't work. But if that TARDIS is a part of my past, I should be able to access its recording of what happened using my TARDIS's memory banks. The TARDIS keeps a record of everything that ever happens in the control room, a bit like CCTV, but not CCTV," he said. He spun a dial, and the built-in monitor lit up. "Ha!" he cried. "Now we're getting somewhere!"

"But doesn't that mean that that TARDIS is from your past?" Rose asked.

"Not necessarily," he said. "Now the two of you think that that was me you saw, correct?"

"Yes," Rose and Mickey said in unison.

"So I'm going to go with that assumption and prove to you that you're wrong and that there just wasn't any time that I could possibly have been here in that regeneration." He made an adjustment and on the monitor appeared a fiery object that was in the general shape of a man.

Rose gasped, a quick involuntary intake of air at the sight. "That's you regenerating into the you I met, isn't it?" she asked quietly.

"Yeah," the Doctor said. As he spoke, on the screen the fire coalesced into the Doctor Rose and Mickey had first met.

The Doctor on the screen sank to the floor and dropped his head into his hands. His body shook. Mickey stared at the screen in astonishment to see the man who had always seemed so strong be so broken. Rose bit her lip as tears sprang to her eyes.

The Doctor swallowed hard. "Well, I don't think we need to see that," he said. "Fast forward." He made an adjustment to the controls and the images began to whiz past, too fast for Rose and Mickey to make out. He slowed them down. Now on the screen was the leather and jumper wearing Doctor putting together something that was about the size of his hand as a warning light blinked on the control panel.

"That's the thing you used to blow up my job with!" Rose said.

"Yep!" he replied. "Just before I met you. And you were the first person I met. This proves that." On the screen, the Doctor left the TARDIS and it sat empty. "Fast forward again."

They all watched as the Doctor returned, left, returned, and left again. In between times, they could see him move the TARDIS.

"If you took off in the TARDIS," Mickey said, "what's to say you didn't go back in time or something?"

"Do you really think I'd take off in the middle of fighting the Nestene Consciousness to pop back to have tea on the Titanic?" the Doctor said incredulously. "Might do afterwards… but not during!"

The younger Doctor returned to the console room. He was carrying something that he attached to the console. From the image on the screen it wasn't clear what it was.

"What's he doin'?" Mickey asked.

"Is that when…" Rose began. On the screen, a younger Rose ran in through the TARDIS door, stopped and stared around her, and then ran out again. When she came back in, the Doctor was standing by the console. It was obvious they were talking to each other, and Rose noticed something she hadn't noticed up until that point.

"Where's the sound?" she asked.

"Oh, right," the Doctor said. He made some adjustments.

_"It's alien,"_ the onscreen Rose said.

_"Yep."_

_"Are you alien?"_

_"Yes,"_ he answered. _"Is that alright?"_

_"Yeah,"_ she said immediately.

_"It's called the TARDIS, this thing,"_ he told her_. "T-A-R-D-I-S, that's Time And Relative Dimension In Space."_

The onscreen Rose made a small sound like she was trying not to cry.  
_  
"That's okay,"_ the onscreen Doctor said. _"Culture shock. Happens to the best of us."_

_"Did they kill him?"_ she asked. "_Mickey? Did they kill Mickey? Is he dead?"_

_"Oh... didn't think of that."_

The Doctor quickly fast forwarded while Mickey stared at him.

"Unbelievable," he said. "Rose was right. You completely forgot about me."

The Doctor didn't answer.

Onscreen, they saw the younger Doctor fly Mickey and Rose back to the Estate. Rose and Mickey left the TARDIS while the Doctor stood in the doorway. Again they couldn't hear the conversation. The Doctor turned and walked back into the TARDIS, shutting the door behind him. He crossed to the controls and sent the TARDIS into the Vortex. He landed again and walked to the door.

"Okay, here is where I asked you to come with again, Rose," the Doctor said. "We'll see me stand at the doorway and ask you, and then we'll see you come inside again."

But instead, onscreen the Doctor walked out the door and shut it behind him. For several long moments nothing happened.

The Doctor stared at the screen, brow furrowed. "I don't understand. It didn't happen like that. I went back for you and you came with." He fast forwarded until the point where his younger self walked back into the TARDIS. The Doctor checked the display. "I don't get it. According to this, I was gone over four hours."

As they continued to watch the screen, the younger Doctor flew the TARDIS somewhere else and left again. The Doctor fast forwarded. This time his younger self was gone for over a day before returning.

"Why don't I remember this?" the Doctor said under his breath.

Over and over again the Doctor fast forwarded through the TARDIS's monitoring of the console room. The younger Doctor would land somewhere and leave, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, before returning.

And then the footage stopped and was replaced by static.

"What happened?" Mickey asked.

"I don't know," the Doctor replied. "Some sort of interference. But that shouldn't happen inside the TARDIS."

He turned a dial and for a moment the image cleared somewhat. The younger Doctor was rushing around the central controls. The Doctor turned the sound back on.

"No, no, no, no, no!" they could hear the other Doctor shout through the static. He began trying to fix something on the console with his sonic screwdriver.

The image disappeared again for a moment, only to be replaced by a view of the Doctor huddled over. He cried out. More static, and then they could see the younger Doctor unconscious on the floor. Something dropped from the ceiling. The Doctor froze the image.

"What is that?" the Doctor said, squinting at the monitor. "I can't make it out." He took a deep breath and let it out in a huff of frustration. "One thing more I can try." He typed in a command.

A holographic image of the younger Doctor appeared on the other side of the room. He was lying on the floor, clearly unconscious. As the image flickered, something that looked like a helmet descended from the ceiling and fitted itself neatly onto the younger Doctor's head. There was a flash of light and the hologram vanished for a moment. When it returned, the trio could see the TARDIS door open. A portion of the grating that made up the floor lifted up, causing the Doctor to roll out the door. The door shut again and the image abruptly shut off. Rose and Mickey turned and stared at the Doctor they were with. His jaw had dropped in shock.

"Blimey," the Doctor said under his breath.


	4. Chapter 3

**a/n: Posting a little early because I want to get on a Friday posting schedule.**

* * *

**Chapter Three**

_A holographic image of the younger Doctor appeared. He was lying on the floor, clearly unconscious. As the image flickered, something that looked like a helmet descended from the ceiling and fitted itself neatly onto the younger Doctor's head. There was a flash of light and the hologram vanished for a moment. When it returned, the trio could see the TARDIS door open. A portion of the grating that made up the floor lifted up, causing the Doctor to roll out the door. The door shut again and the image abruptly shut off. Rose and Mickey turned and stared at the Doctor they were with. His jaw had dropped in shock._

_"Blimey," the Doctor said under his breath._

"What… what just happened?" Rose asked. "What was that thing?"

"Something I never thought I'd ever have to use," the Doctor said. "And as for what just happened, I'm not entirely sure. But I think I need to see the man who looks like the old me." He ran a hand through his hair, causing it to stand up. "The question is, how? How to get a good look at him without him seeing me?"

"But if it is him, you, it'll be before you've regenerated, yeah? So he won't know who you are," Rose said.

"I can't count on that," the Doctor told her. "I told you that there's an echo when I meet myself."

"But if that's the case, with you here, shouldn't he be feeling the echo now?" she asked.

"Assuming the person you saw is me," the Doctor said, "we both should be. But it's possible that I'm not feeling one because we're not close enough together." He frowned. "Under normal circumstances, and admittedly these are not normal circumstances, if we met face to face he'd be able to tell I'm a Time Lord, and since there aren't any other Time Lords, and since he wouldn't recognize me, he'd know I was a future version of him…"

"But you said you've met yourself before," Rose said.

"Yeah, I have. But in this case I'm interfering in my own timeline. This has to be handled delicately. If it's not handled carefully enough, the results could be catastrophic. And not just to me... Well, let's just say I don't want to risk it." His brow furrowed thoughtfully. "Mickey said whoever that was may have recognized you, but he didn't know who you were. That would mean he's met you before. If he's me and I've already met you, why wouldn't I know who you were?" He sighed loudly in frustration. "And why don't I remember any of this?"

"I dunno," she said, "but I do have an idea about seeing him. There's a couple of restaurants right across the street from the garage. Maybe we can wait in one of them until the shop closes and he leaves. We should get a good view of him without him seein' us."

"What time is it?" Mickey asked.

"A little after five, local time," the Doctor answered.

Mickey shook his head. "It's Saturday. The shop's probably closed by now." He pulled his mobile out of his pocket. After a brief conversation, he rang off and turned back to them. "He's already gone for the day. Did find out his full name though." He looked at the Doctor evenly. "John Smith. Isn't that the name you used when you were teachin' at Deffrey Vale?"

The Doctor and Rose exchanged glances, with Rose's clearly saying _I told you so_.

"We need more information about him," the Doctor said. "How long he's been here. Where he lives. Where he was before he got here."

"So you're no longer denyin' he's you?" Mickey asked.

The Doctor yanked on one ear and grimaced. "With the evidence we have so far, let's just say it's… _possible_ he's me. But the jury's still out." Mickey rolled his eyes. "The question is," the Doctor continued, "if we can't talk to him directly, don't even know where he is, how are we going to get the answers we need?"

Rose and Mickey exchanged glances and smirked. "Well, there's one person on the Estate that not only knows everybody but everybody's business too," Mickey said.

The Doctor glanced from one to the other of them. "Who?" he asked. And then it hit him. He got a pained expression on his face. "Oh, no."

~oOo~

John unlocked the door to his flat and carried his dinner straight back into the small space that was his lounge. Not one for cooking, John had picked up a sandwich and crisps from the deli down the street and some beer from Tesco Express on his way home. It was either takeaway or beans on toast, and even the idea of beans on toast made him shudder in disgust.

He set the food down on the beat-up old coffee table and sat down on the threadbare sofa. Not only was the sofa worn, but it was ugly. It was covered in a rough, plaid fabric in orange, yellow and black that hadn't been popular since the '70s. The flat had come furnished, which suited him since he hadn't owned anything except a change of clothes when he had arrived back on the Estate, but everything in the place was in bad shape and hadn't been particularly nice when new. The only exceptions were a very expensive new mattress and a state of the art computer system that he had purchased himself. To the outside world they would have seemed like luxuries, particularly in light of his meager salary, but he considered them necessities. The computer system was vital for his continuing search for clues to who he was. And the need for a decent mattress was self-evident. The old one was badly stained and emitted an odor whose source didn't bear thinking about, plus it had a spring that caught him in the back no matter how he lay down on it.

He flipped on the ancient television before cracking open a beer and unwrapping his sandwich. There was nothing of interest on, nothing that interested him at any rate. He wasn't into sports, the news wasn't new but a rehash of what had happened the previous week, game shows were too easy and thus boring, and dramas? Too domestic. He watched a few minutes of an American science fiction program until he decided the science behind it was so ridiculous that it made the show unwatchable.

Finally he found a channel broadcasting a movie he hadn't seen, a recent James Bond film starring an actor he didn't know. He took a swig of his beer and sat back, willing to suspend disbelief for a few minutes. But his mind wandered back to the shop and the girl he had seen. He had seen more than blonde hair. He had caught a glimpse of her face before she had left. He sat back and closed his eyes, trying to recapture the image.

_Blonde hair. A wide mouth... _

He was startled from his reverie by something jumping onto the sofa next to him. He opened his eyes again. A black cat was sitting next to him, calmly helping itself to his sandwich.

It was not his cat. He did not own a cat. He raised an eyebrow.

"Where did you come from?" he said, figuring it had wandered in from the Estate through the cat flap built into the exterior door. He vaguely recalled someone telling him that the strays would do that but he couldn't remember who, or when he had had that conversation.

The cat did not deign to answer, not with a meow or even a glance in his direction. Instead it continued to focus on trying to eat his dinner.

"Oi, that's mine," he protested. He ripped off a chunk of the sandwich—the portion that had been chewed on by the cat—and put it on the floor. The cat jumped down, pulled the meat and cheese out from between the bread slices, and began to nibble on it.

"You must be thirsty," he said. Shoving the rest of the sandwich in his mouth, he got up and went into the kitchen for a bowl of water. On the way back he retrieved his sketchpad and pencils from the bedroom.

"Now you can stay for a bit," he told the cat as it—no, she—began to drink. "But you can't move in. Don't know how long I'm stayin' here."

The cat ignored him and returned to eating the cheese. John watched for a minute and then turned to the sketchpad. He flipped through the pages, glancing at his drawings. Monsters, metal men, pepper pots fitted with eye stalks, plungers and whisks—a psychiatrist would have a field day with him. He flipped quickly through those pages, as he did the pictures of planets on fire. Perhaps not typical dream images, but all they were were dream images. They could have nothing to do with his previous life.

He turned the page and saw the sketch of the girl he had been working on that morning. Now he could see what was wrong with it. Her nose was slightly shorter and wider than he had drawn. And her ears… They were smaller, but there was more. Something missing.

Earrings. Big gold-colored hoops.

He made the corrections, just barely adjusting a line here, a shadow there, and then added the earrings. When he was finished, he sat back and stared at the picture.

It was her. The girl he had been dreaming about. But more than that, it was the girl he had seen in the shop. The girl's hair had been shorter, her makeup different, but it was her, he was sure of it.

The cat jumped back up on the sofa and rubbed against him, purring. He absently stroked her head as he puzzled over the drawing.

"Who are you?" he said. "And how can I find you again?"

~oOo~

"Now remember," Rose said, "don't tell Mum we've been here all day."

Both the Doctor and Mickey rolled their eyes. They were carrying a couple of pizzas: part dinner, part peace offering just in case she had heard they were back and hadn't stopped by the flat first.

"As if," Mickey said.

Rose unlocked the door. As they walked in the door, she was struck as always by how tiny the flat was. Despite having recently been repaired from damage it had received at Christmastime and received a fresh coat of paint, the narrow hall looked cramped and dark. Perhaps the flat seemed small because she was comparing it to the grandeur of the TARDIS, she supposed. Or perhaps she had just outgrown it, as she had outgrown Estate life while traveling with the Doctor.

Deciding not to dwell on that thought, she called out to her mum.

"Mum, we're home. Are you here?"

Before the words were out of her mouth, Jackie ran out of the lounge and met them in the hall. "Rose!" she exclaimed and pulled her daughter in for a hug. "Why don't you ever call? Why bother even having a mobile when you don't use it?"

Rose knew that her mother really didn't expect an answer. "We brought dinner," she said when her mother let her go.

"Thank goodness," her mother said. "I've got nothing in. Certainly not enough for those two." Jackie cast a disparaging glance towards the lounge. The two women followed them in to find that in the short time she had been hugging Rose, the Doctor and Mickey had gone into the lounge, settled themselves on the white imitation-leather chairs, and begun to eat. Mickey had a slice of pizza in one hand and was using the remote to flip through the channels on the telly with the other.

"Don't get too comfortable," Jackie told them all. "Stuart is comin' over."

"Stuart? Who's Stuart?" Rose asked. "Whatever happened to Dennis?"

"And as far as that's concerned, whatever happened to Howard?" the Doctor added.

"Howard was ages ago, and as for Dennis…" Jackie made a rude noise. "Stuart works over at the Chinese takeaway," she told them.

Rose frowned thoughtfully. "Stuart, Stuart… Oh, I remember! Isn't he the cook over there?"

"Yeah," Jackie said.

"Oh! Is he the one who does the wonderful chips?" the Doctor asked.

"That's him," Jackie said. "Does a gorgeous curry as well."

"You know, you should tell him to put the chips in newspaper," the Doctor told her. "Nothing like chips served the traditional way in newspaper. They taste better than when they're wrapped in foil. The newspaper doesn't trap the moisture like foil does, and it absorbs some of the oil, leaving them crisp instead of soggy."

Rose rolled her eyes. "I think you just like the flavor of newspaper ink," she said.

"Depends on the ink used, Rose," he said. "Some are quite bitter."

"Trust you to know," she muttered.

Jackie retrieved some plates and napkins from the kitchen. She pointedly handed a plate and napkin each to the Doctor and Mickey, warning them not to make a mess. Mickey took both without turning from the television. There was another match on.

After the two women helped themselves to slices of pizza and sat down on the sofa, the Doctor turned to them.

"So, Jackie," he said between bites of extra cheese and pepperoni. "What's new around here?"

Rose's eyes got huge. _What are you doing_, she mouthed. She knew from long years of experience that asking her mother a leading question like that could set them up for a several hour gossip session despite her mum's new boyfriend coming over.

The Doctor ignored her and grinned at Jackie.

"Well," Jackie said conspiratorially. "Rose, your cousin Lavina is pregnant again. This will be her fourth. Mo got a new job, not sure doin' what though. Bev's sister's daughter got another tattoo. This one winds half up her arm. Looks like a snake." She shuddered. "And someone new just moved in across the way. A real grouch. But that's not all bad. He managed to get Rita and Chuck quiet for once. I thought the row they were having this morning would last into next week…"

As Jackie continued to talk, Rose watched the Doctor take another bite. The cheese stretched, forming a long string between the slice of pizza and his mouth. He wrapped it around his tongue three times before biting it off and pulling it into his mouth. She stared at him, disturbed by how disgusted she was yet at the same time how oddly arousing she found it. As if he knew what she was thinking, he smirked at her and gave her a wink.

"Git," she said under her breath.

An hour later, Rose shifted uncomfortably in her seat. Mickey had switched to watching a movie at some point and was still staring at the screen. And her mother was still talking. The Doctor was pretending to be engrossed in the dramas taking place on the Estate, periodically making sympathetic noises. She didn't know how he could do it. Listening to her mum go on and on like that made her eyes cross.

"And Brian's son what's-his-name is marrying that girl he's been living with the past couple of years," Jackie said.

At that, Rose's ears perked up. "Susie? Rob's marrying Susie?"

"Yeah," her mother answered. "Wasn't she one of the ones that you used to hang out with?"

"Yeah, she was." Mickey answered for Rose without turning from the telly. "It was Rose, Susie, Shareen, Keisha, and Rita. They'd all go out clubbin', then come home absolutely pissed. Sometimes Rose'd stay out all night with 'em and say she'd stayed with Shareen or Keisha and they'd say they had stayed here."

As Jackie raised an eyebrow at her daughter, Rose glared at him. "And thank you so much for sharing that with my mother, Mick. Just wait until I tell Mum and the Doctor about the time you…"

At this, Mickey finally turned from the television. "No!" he said quickly. "Don't need to go into all that."

The Doctor leaned back against the back of the sofa. His eyebrow arched and a small, amused smile played around his lips.

"Anyway, if the two of you were friends, you'd probably be invited to the wedding, Rose. That is, if you were here," Jackie said pointedly.

"We might be able to come back for it," the Doctor said, and Rose looked at him in surprise. Shock was more like. _Are you sure,_ she mouthed. He shrugged indifferently.

"Uh, yeah," she said, turning back to her mother. "We might be able to come back."

"Good," Jackie said vehemently. "People are always askin' about you, what you're doin', when you're comin' back, that sort of thing. I never know what to tell them."

"Tell them I'm traveling," Rose said.

"Traveling? People will only buy traveling for so long, and then they begin to wonder if you're in jail," Jackie replied.

"Or dead," Mickey said with a sharp glance at Jackie. He had never completely gotten over the fact that for a year people had thought he had murdered Rose when she had begun traveling with the Doctor. Rose's mother, who had been behind the rumor of Mickey murdering Rose, didn't have the grace to look shamefaced. She had apologized, and in her mind that was the end of it.

"So, Jackie, Rose and Mickey went past the auto repair shop today…" the Doctor said, changing the subject. He didn't need to say more. It was enough to get Jackie started again.

"Oh, yeah, they've fixed it all up," she said. "They've got a new mechanic, too. He's the one who ended the row between Rita and Chuck." They all looked at her blankly. "I told you, but as usual none of you were listening. He just moved in across the way a few months ago. Works at the shop and does odd jobs around the Estate. Had him in here myself to fix my faucet since no one here was around to do it."

"He was here?" Rose asked incredulously. "In the flat? And you didn't mention it?"

"Why would I?" Jackie asked. "'S just a faucet."

"Did he look like anyone you know?" Rose asked. "Seem familiar in any way?"

"Not really," she said. She thought for a moment. "Maybe a bit like that American bloke from the Tour de France. Lance something or other."

"Lance Armstrong?" the Doctor asked incredulously.

Jackie nodded. "Yeah, that's the one," she answered. "Not much, mind, but a bit."

"Why would Lance Armstrong be livin' on the Estate?" Mickey asked.

"Didn't say he was, did I?" Jackie said.

"Did he remind you of anyone else?" Rose asked.

"Well, he did look a little like first him," she said. "Just a little bit, though. He's got much longer hair and a scruffy beard half the time, and no leather jacket. Course it is July…"

"And you didn't think to call me?"

"Why would I?" Jackie asked again. "'S not him, after all. He changed. Doesn't look like that anymore. 'S not like he can change back." She paused as if a thought just occurred to her. "You can't change back, can you?"

"No, he can't," Rose answered.

"I don't know why you think I should have called. You know it's not him, Rose. He's sittin' right there next to you."

"Yes, of course I am," the Doctor said smoothly. "And where else would I be?"

Jackie frowned. "Why all the questions?" she asked suspiciously. "'S not like any of you to care one way or t'other what happens around here."

They were saved from answering by a knock at the door. Jackie got up. "That'll be Stuart," she said. "I'd invite you to stay…" Her tone indicated that that was the last thing she wanted them to do.

"Nah, we'll be on our way," the Doctor said as they stood. Mickey picked up the pizza boxes. "Things to do, places to go and all that."

They met Stuart on the way out. He was a short Asian man who appeared to be in his mid-forties and smelled vaguely of Chinese takeaway and chips.

"Have you ever considered serving your chips in newspaper, Stuart?" the Doctor asked after they had been introduced. "It really brings out the flavor."

Stuart looked puzzled at the question. "Newspaper?" he asked.

Rose poked the Doctor in the side. When he turned to her she glared at him. "Ignore him," she said to Stuart. "That's what the rest of us do." She turned to give her mother a hug. "We'll be back soon, yeah?"

"Just don't let it be three months this time," Jackie replied.

"Oh, it won't," the Doctor said. "Probably will be tomorrow."

Jackie rolled her eyes. "I'll believe _that_ when I see it."

"Tomorrow?" Rose asked as the door shut behind them.

"I doubt the TARDIS will let us take off yet," the Doctor told her. "Probably won't until we know more about what's going on." He looked across the courtyard. "Hmm. Should have asked Jackie which flat he's in." He glanced back at the door and then grimaced. "Nope. Not going back in there."

"I could ask around, see if anyone else knows what flat he's in," Mickey suggested.

The Doctor scratched the back of his head thoughtfully. "No, I don't want him to find out people have been asking questions about him. Tomorrow is soon enough. With both TARDISes out of commission, it's not like either of us is going anywhere." His voice dwindled off, and he frowned. "I'm still not entirely sure what happened or why. I need to try and get more information from the TARDIS—see if I can clear up some of the interference. Only then can we figure out how to fix all this."

As the Doctor and Mickey began to make their way to the stairwell, Rose hung back, staring at the windows of the building across the courtyard. Lights were just beginning to come on in the windows, and she wondered which one was his.

He was over there somewhere. Her first Doctor. Her heart ached at the thought. Even though the Doctor was still with her, sometimes she missed his old self: beat up leather jacket, big ears and all. She wished she could see him again, just spend time with him, kind of like she had wanted to see her father again, but not. The feelings she had had for her Doctor were nothing like what she had had for her dad.

But look how seeing her father had turned out, with the Earth almost being sterilized by reapers. She couldn't risk the paradox.

But what she wouldn't give to see her first Doctor again.

"Rose, Rose!" The Doctor's voice pulled her out of her thoughts. She turned to him. "We're headed back to the TARDIS. Are you coming, or are you staying here?"

"I'm coming," she said.

He nodded. As he headed down the stairs, she began to follow, but not without a backward glance at the other building again.


	5. Chapter 4

**a/n: Minor reference to _The Feast of the Drowned_ by Stephen Cole.**

* * *

**Chapter Four**

On their way back to the TARDIS, Mickey decided not to go with them.

"We've been gone three months," he said. "I've got to check to see if my flat is still mine and find out where my stuff is."

"Do you want me to go with?" Rose asked.

"Nah," he said. "I figure I'd go back to the pub for a bit afterwards. Unless you wanna come with?"

She rolled her eyes. "Oh, yeah, I'd love to sit around and watch you watch more telly," she said sarcastically.

Once back at the TARDIS, the Doctor immediately began to work on the console, trying to get more information from the TARDIS's memory banks. For a while Rose sat on the jump seat, hands under her thighs, feet swinging back and forth, as she watched him work. Normally when he worked on the TARDIS he'd keep up a running commentary, explaining to her what he was doing and why, and even if she didn't understand a word he was saying she'd feel like she was a part of everything. But this time he was completely silent. She knew it was just an indication of how serious he felt the situation was, but she still felt oddly excluded in a way she hadn't ever felt with him before they had met Reinette.

After a few more minutes of staring at him staring at the monitor, she got restless and got up to get something to read. Months earlier, before he had changed even, the Doctor had given her her own storage space in the console room. It was a small compartment under one of the floor gratings where she could keep some of her own stuff so she wouldn't have to run back to her own room every time she wanted something. At the time it had felt almost as momentous as when he had given her a key to the TARDIS. The Doctor had blushed, actually properly blushed, when Jack had compared it to him emptying out a drawer in his bedroom for her.

Rose got out a paperback novel and returned to the jump seat, but she wasn't able to concentrate on it. Instead her mind kept returning to the tiny glimpse she had had of her first Doctor. She reread the same page three times, not remembering a single word of it, as his face swam in front of her eyes.

She threw the book down on the seat next to her.

"Stop it," she muttered to herself.

The Doctor looked up. "What did you say, Rose?"

"Nothing," she said. "Sorry."

He nodded and returned to what he was doing.

Well, there wasn't anything she could do here, she thought. Anything she did would just distract him, and she clearly needed a distraction as well. She considered going out to try and find Mickey, but she knew from experience that sitting around the pub would be as boring as sitting around the console room.

Lord, what had she done on Saturday nights on the Estate before she had run off with the Doctor?

Clubbing, she reminded herself. Mickey had been right. She had spent a lot of time clubbing with Keisha, Shareen, Susie and Rita. She briefly considered ringing one of them, maybe even getting together, but she quickly rejected the idea. She knew Susie and Rita had blokes and would want to be with them on a Saturday night. She wasn't sure whether Keisha and Shareen had boyfriends, but if they didn't, and if they were anything like they used to be, they'd probably want to go pub crawling or something. She didn't want to go with them to try and pick someone up at a club, that wasn't her anymore.

But even if they didn't want to go out, what would she talk to them about anyway?

_What have you been up to the last couple of years, Rose?_

_Oh, I ran away with an alien from outer space. He has a time machine, and we've not only traveled millions of years in the future, but into the past as well. I've met a bodiless head in a jar, cat nun nurses, a woman who had had so much plastic surgery she had turned herself into a bitchy trampoline, and a werewolf from outer space. I've even met the Prime Minister and Queen Victoria._

No. The last time she had tried to talk to Keisha about what she had been up to she'd had to lie through her teeth about the Doctor, something Keisha hadn't noticed at the time because she was distracted by her own problems. She couldn't count on that this time.

She wandered the corridors for a bit, taking peeks into rooms she had never been in before—and why did the TARDIS have an entire room devoted to shoelaces, anyway? Finally, she watched a movie in the media room and went to bed.

Once there, though, she tossed and turned as her mind raced. Ever since Christmas in Cardiff in 1869, she had known that with a time machine the Doctor could take her into the past, where people long dead were alive again. But even after meeting Charles Dickens, Reinette, even her own father and herself as a baby, it had never occurred to her that she could ever see a past version of the Doctor himself.

As she fell asleep, her mind returned to the tiny glimpse she had had of him in the garage.

And longed for another one.

~oOo~

The Doctor huffed in irritation as he yet again watched the images on the small screen built into the TARDIS console. Nothing he did was clearing up the static in the display.

"Rose, this looks less like interference in the CCTV and more like actual damage to the TARDIS memory core. I can't figure it out. Any ideas?"

When Rose didn't answer, he looked up from the monitor. She wasn't there. He scanned his Time Sense only to realize to his surprise that it had been more than four hours since they had gotten back to the TARDIS. She must have gone to bed, he told himself.

Disappointed by her absence, he frowned and turned back to the screen.

~oOo~

_"Exterminate! Exterminate!"_

_Beams of deadly light lit up the night. He could hear the sounds of explosions, of feet running, of desperate parents calling for their lost children._

_"Exterminate! Exterminate!"_

_Giant pepper pots swooped out of the sky and floated above the ground, shooting everything in sight._

_"Exterminate! Exterminate!"_

_Children screamed in fright and pain. _

_Fire. Fire everywhere. Burning everything in its path._

_"No more," he muttered, his voice low and cold._

_"Exterminate! Exterminate!"_

_"No more," he growled angrily._

_"Exterminate! Exterminate!"_

_"NO MORE!" His voice rang out over the din. "NO MORE! NO MORE!"_

Heart pounding and chest heaving, John shot up, fully awake in an instant. This nightmare had been the worst yet. He reached over for his sketchbook, and stopped. His hands were shaking. Besides, there was nothing about this nightmare he wanted to remember.

In an effort to calm himself he closed his eyes and took in several deep lungfuls of air, blowing them out slowly. Gradually his heart rate slowed.

The images made no sense to him. They had, could have, no basis in reality. But dream images often were symbolic of something else, he reminded himself. The dreamscape seemed clearly to be symbolic of a battle of some type.

All of a sudden it occurred to him that perhaps he could have been a soldier.

He could have kicked himself. How could he have been so stupid? Why hadn't he thought of that before? The vast majority of the dreams he had were of war, albeit in a futuristic setting. Perhaps he was suffering from amnesia brought on by some form of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Knowing he wouldn't get any more sleep, he got out of bed and sat down in front of his computer. His fingers flew across the keyboard. In his effort to try to find out who he was, over the last several months he'd hacked into a half-dozen computer databases and created false accounts so he could easily enter any time he wanted. The first time he had broken into one of the websites, he had wondered where, how and why he had learned how to do it, but now he just accepted the fact that he could and was grateful for the skill set.

This time he broke into the websites of the armed forces rather than that of Scotland Yard or the NHS. It took no more effort for him than hacking into the others had. But several hours later he knew no more than when he had begun. Since the nightmare had featured a ground battle, he searched the army database for soldiers, regardless of name, matching his general description who were either retired or missing-in-action and presumed dead. When he had found nothing he had expanded his search to the navy and the RAF. Still nothing. A dead end.

John sat back and frowned at the computer. Now what?

What about the girl?

He had concentrated on searching for himself on the internet, but he hadn't searched for her, in part because there hadn't been a way of looking for someone based only on hair color. He hadn't known anything else about her, not her name, not what she looked like, not even if she was real. But now he knew she not only existed, but she was here, on the Powell Estate.

He retrieved his drawing and scanned it into his computer, but the photo recognition software couldn't get a match on the internet off of his drawing.

Another dead end.

He glanced at the clock and groaned. Not quite 8 am. And it was Sunday. He hated Sundays. They were so boring. The garage was closed on Sundays. And he had no odd jobs scheduled for the day. Maybe he'd go into work anyway, he decided.

Just as he was about to get up, the black cat jumped in his lap.

"You still here?" he asked with a quirk of one eyebrow. "You're not movin' in, you know." The cat butted her head against his hand and he sighed. "Alright, let's get you something to eat. But then I'm puttin' you out, because you're not movin' in."

The cat just purred.

~oOo~

The next morning Rose slowly awoke in her room in the TARDIS. Although she couldn't rightly remember, she knew she had dreamed of her first Doctor. Right after the Doctor had regenerated, she had dreamed of his previous self every night, but it had been months since the last time.

She closed her eyes and buried her head back in her pillow, trying to recapture her dream. But there was no use. She was too awake.

Yawning widely, she sat up and stretched, wondering what time it was. She didn't have a clock in her room in the TARDIS. There was no real point. No job, no set schedule, and, as the Doctor frequently reminded her, no time in the conventional sense aboard the TARDIS either. With time travel, she could wake up only to find herself on a planet that was entering its nighttime hours or vice versa. When she had first begun traveling with him she had developed a killer case of jet lag trying to keep track of where and when they were, until the Doctor told her not to worry about it and work within her own circadian rhythms.

But they were on the Estate, and there was actual linear time there, so if they were stuck there for a while she might actually need a clock. She shuddered in disgust. She hadn't needed a clock since she had worked at Henrik's.

After showering and getting dressed, Rose stopped by Mickey's room. He wasn't there. Nor was he in the kitchen. Neither was the Doctor. After having a much needed cup of tea from the perfectly hot, never empty pot on the counter, she looked around for Mickey a bit more before wandering into the TARDIS console room. It looked empty. Only the telltale whirr of the Doctor's sonic screwdriver told her he was there somewhere.

She found him sitting on the floor, wedged under the console. He was sonicking something that looked almost like a glowing aubergine while disconnected wires, bits of electronics, and other things that looked more grown than made hung around him. Nearby was a box containing a half-dozen more of the egg-shaped things while another one lay on the grating next to him. That one had a smoky appearance to it, almost as if it was a giant, burned out light bulb.

She stood there for more than a minute before he realized she was there.

"Oh, Rose," he said when he finally noticed her. "You're up."

_Well spotted_, she thought, biting back the sarcastic reply. She was still irritated by his ignoring her the previous night. But that wasn't fair to him, she reminded herself. He was busy with a crisis, and it wasn't his job to pay attention to her. "What are you doing?" she asked instead.

"Replacing some ganglionic circuits from the TARDIS's neural net," he told her. He pointed the sonic at a couple of the hanging wires. They moved towards one another, twisting themselves together and reattaching themselves. When they were finished, it was impossible to see where one had ended and the other had begun. "And I'm almost finished. Unfortunately the static in the CCTV playback was more than static. It was actual damage to the TARDIS's memory core itself." He pointed his sonic screwdriver at the aubergine thing again. As the sonic whirred, its glow brightened.

"Do you know where Mickey is?" she asked.

"Did you check his room?"

She rolled her eyes. "Yes."

"Kitchen?"

"Yes."

"Game room?"

"Yes."

"Swimming pool?"

"He's really not much of a swimmer," she told him.

"Library? No, he wouldn't be there," the Doctor said, answering his own question.

Before Rose could defend him, Mickey burst into the TARDIS, breathing hard as if he had just run a long distance flat out. He bent over, putting his hands on his knees, and gasped for air.

"I am so out of shape," he complained.

"Where were you?" she asked.

"My flat," he told her. "I found out someone paid my rent for six months in advance. But that's not important." He turned to the Doctor. "I know where he is."

~oOo~

"I was just walkin' down the street, on my way back to the TARDIS, when I saw him," Mickey said for the fifth time as they stood across the street from the auto repair shop. Unlike the day before, since it was Sunday morning the street was almost deserted. "He was comin' out of the bakery eatin' a doughnut and carryin' a cup of coffee so I followed him."

"And he went into the garage," the Doctor said. It was clear he wanted less to clarify what Mickey had said than to just stop him repeating himself again.

"Yeah," Mickey answered.

"Hmm." The Doctor cocked his head and stared at the garage thoughtfully. "Well, assuming he's still in there, this is probably my best chance to get a good look at him. What's the best way to get in there unnoticed?"

"Through the office?" Rose suggested.

"It'll be locked," Mickey warned, "and before you suggest unlocking it with your sonic, there's an alarm. Same as the back way."

"I could silence the alarm," the Doctor said, "but he'd still hear the door open and close."

"Y'know, if all you want is to take a look at him, there's a couple of windows in the back. They've got bars across them, but we always keep them open at least a little for ventilation."

The Doctor's mouth twisted into a small grin. "That might work," he said. "You two stay here."

Darting between two parked cars, he took off across the street. Rose started to follow, and Mickey grabbed her arm.

"He said to stay here," he said.

"And since when did either of us ever listen to him?" she asked. She shook off his hand and followed the Doctor, and after a moment's hesitation Mickey followed her.

In the alley behind the garage, the Doctor was standing on a dustbin which had been rolled against the wall and was looking into one of the narrow windows along the eaves. Rose quickly climbed up next to him. She could hear the quiet strains of classical music filtering through the open window.

The Doctor didn't show any surprise at seeing her there.

"Did you see him?" she whispered. He placed a finger over his lips and then gestured at the window. She peeked in.

At first she couldn't see anyone, but then she spotted someone's legs sticking out from under the bright red Vectra in the repair bay directly in front of them. Although it was impossible to see who it was, she knew it was him, if for no other reason than she recognized his heavy black work boots.

"You think that's the man you saw yesterday?" the Doctor whispered.

Rose moved her mouth close to the Doctor's ear. "Yeah, that's him."

"Are you certain?"

"Yes," she said firmly. "Do you feel that echo you were talking about?"

The Doctor shook his head. He pulled his sonic out of a pocket and aimed it through the window. The tip lit up in blue, but she couldn't hear its familiar whirr. In the distance, a dog began to bark.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"The sonic is capable of producing sounds that Time Lords can hear but are far above the range of human hearing," he told her.

Rose looked back in the window. John Smith hadn't moved from his position under the car.

"One more scan," the Doctor said in a low voice. This time the sonic made a quiet whirr, barely audible to Rose even though she was right next to it. The Doctor's brow furrowed as he examined the readings. "He's not a Time Lord. He's completely, one hundred percent human."

"So that's not you after all," Rose said. "He just looks like the old you." She was surprised to feel a wave of disappointment.

"It's a little more complicated than that," the Doctor began, but he was interrupted by a loud crash. They turned as one towards the source of the sound. Mickey had rounded the corner and tripped over a wheelie bin. It had upturned and spilled its contents all over the alley.

Rose heard a sound coming from the inside of the garage and turned back to the window. John Smith had rolled out from under the car he had been working on and was headed towards the back entrance. She nudged the Doctor.

"Time to go!" he said. He hopped off the dustbin and caught Rose as she jumped off. The three ran, rounding the corner just before the back door opened. As they ran, Rose heard a familiar voice coming from the alley behind her.

"What a mess," John said loudly. "Stupid apes."

~oOo~

Back at the TARDIS, the Doctor immediately returned to his position underneath the console. "It's even more important now that I find out exactly what happened," he told them. He quickly replaced the remaining burned out globules.

"Because he wasn't you?" Rose asked.

"No," he replied. "Because he was."

"What?" Rose gaped at him. "But… but… you said he was human. One hundred percent human. If he's human, how is he you?"

"I don't think I can recover all of the missing CCTV footage," the Doctor said, ignoring her question. He pulled his glasses out of his pocket and pushed them on as he stood. With one slender finger he flipped a switch on one of the control panels and the whole room went black except for the console. The faint glow cast odd shadows around the room and gave his skin a bluish cast. "Most of the sections that are missing are too badly damaged to recover, but I don't think I really need them. The most important bit is at the end. I _have_ managed to enhance the footage we've already seen, though. If I can just get an additional second or two to play back in addition to that, it might be all we need."

"Doctor, if he's you, why is he human?" Rose asked.

He looked up and met her eyes. "That's what I'm trying to figure out."

"Right." _Stupid question_, she thought to herself.

The Doctor threw a lever forward. A hologram of the very room they were in superimposed itself on the real console room, making the room look like a 3-D movie being watched without the special glasses they always gave you. Rose was surprised to see minute changes had been made over time, changes she had never noticed. A switch and a dial were currently reversed from their original placement on the console. The door leading deeper into the TARDIS was a different shape than it had been. And the jump seat was not only a foot away from its original location but it was larger as well.

The holographic TARDIS door opened and the translucent shape of Rose's first Doctor walked into the room and crossed to the console. He wandered around it, flipping switches carelessly. He stopped in his tracks and winced before continuing to program in the next set of coordinates.

"Stop," said the current Doctor, and the image froze. He walked to the console and examined the controls. "Looks like I just programmed the coordinates for the Powell Estate."

"So… if the coordinates are set for the Estate, is this when you were coming back for me?" Rose asked.

"Yeah, must be," he told her. He looked up at the ceiling. "Forward, normal speed."

The holographic Doctor began to move again. Grimacing, he rolled his left shoulder and tilted his head left and right as if he was trying to relieve a cramp in his neck.

Smoke began to rise from somewhere within the console, and for a second Rose thought it was real. She only realized it was part of the holographic display when the younger Doctor reacted to the sight.

"No, no, no, no, no!" he shouted. He rushed around the console, appearing to run through the current Doctor. He pulled his sonic screwdriver out of the pocket of his leather jacket. As he began to sonic one of the control panels, his TARDIS lurched. He leaned forward and grabbed onto a protrusion near the central column while he continued to use his screwdriver on the panel.

"Freeze," the current Doctor said. He leaned through the hologram of his previous self and examined the controls. "Hmm. I seemed to have bumped the chrono-temporal relay switch. Reset the arrival time for… Huh. New Year's Eve, 2006." He frowned.

"That was six months ago!" Mickey exclaimed.

"But… but we were on the Estate then," Rose said to the Doctor. "We didn't leave until a few days after that." She gestured at the holographic Doctor currently sprawled all over the console. "Do you mean that you and… you were both there at the same time?"

He looked over his glasses at her. "Me? I don't mean anything." He looked puzzled for a moment. "No, that's _The Restaurant at the End of the Universe_," he said. He glanced at the ceiling. "Forward."

The entire image shimmered and was replaced by static. The Doctor pulled his sonic screwdriver out of his pinstriped pocket and aimed it at one of the controls. The holographic console room reappeared. The leather-clad Doctor was hunched over in pain. He staggered a few steps forward and fell to his knees before collapsing on the floor. In the background they could hear the Cloister Bell ringing, but weakly, as if from a far way off. The helmet that the Doctor had shown her before dropped from the ceiling and fitted itself to the holographic Doctor's head.

"Freeze," the pinstriped Doctor said again. He walked over to his previous self and knelt beside him. He pointed at the helmet. "That's a Chameleon Arch. Has the capability of rewriting a Time Lord's entire biology, changing every cell and turning him into a completely different species. This piece," he pointed out a circular part in front, "stores the Time Lord's true identity while he's in another form. It appears that the TARDIS used the Chameleon Arch to turn me human for some reason." He grimaced. "Could have been worse, I suppose. She could have turned me into anything. Could have ended up a Denebian slime devil or a Canidine Rosikan or something. Could have even ended up as a Slitheen."

Rose slowly walked over to the hologram of her first Doctor and crouched next to him. Now that she could get a closer look at it, she realized the Chameleon Arch didn't really look much like a helmet at all. The metal structure had a main arch that stretched across the top of his head from side to side, held in place with horizontal bars that clamped onto the sides of his head and large disks that pressed against his temples. Another secondary arch stretched from the central arch to his forehead, holding the circular thing the Doctor had pointed out tightly against his younger self's forehead. It appeared to be a silver fob watch, not unlike the one her great-grandfather had had, but this one had the Doctor's circular language engraved into the lid.

Despite being unconscious, the holographic Doctor's face was twisted in pain. Biting her lower lip, she reached out a hand as if to touch him before pulling it back. She drew in a shaky breath.

"Wouldn't that hurt, changing species like that?" Mickey asked

"Yes," the Doctor said shortly. He began to wander the room, ducking his head to look under the jump seat and behind the coral struts. "The only reason she would do something like this is if there was no other choice. The real question is what that was."

At his matter-of-fact tone, Rose stared at him in disbelief. He sounded as if he didn't care what the other Doctor had gone through. _Same man_, she reminded herself finally. He might not remember it, but he's the one who went through it.

"What are you lookin' for?" Mickey asked.

"The TARDIS locked me out, therefore she's been injured. I'm trying to figure out what could have caused it. I'm also looking for anything out of place," the Doctor answered. "Like this." He pointed under the console. A holographic sonic screwdriver lay on the grating under it. "I must have dropped it when I collapsed."

Mickey and Rose joined in the search, but they couldn't find anything.

"Forward, one quarter speed," the Doctor said.

The Cloister Bell resumed its weak tolling. As they watched, the holographic Chameleon Arch detached itself from the younger Doctor's head and withdrew into the ceiling of the console room, leaving the fob watch on the floor in front of the Doctor's face. The light illuminating the holographic console room flickered, briefly turning mauve before returning to its normal color. The grating under the Doctor rose up on one end, causing him to roll towards the door. It opened by itself.

As the holographic Doctor rolled from one section of grating to another, new sections of the floor would rise up, slowly forcing him towards the door and out of the TARDIS. Then the door shut behind him. The light began to flicker in mauve again.

"Stop!" the pinstriped Doctor yelled, and the image froze. He rushed to the door and knelt down, staring at something on the floor. When he looked up again, his face was visibly pale, made worse by the mauve light shining on his face.

"What is it?" Rose asked.

"The fob watch. It got stuck on the floor between the ramp and the threshold of the door. It's still in the other TARDIS, and as long as it's there, he can't change back."


	6. Chapter 5

**Chapter Five**

The Doctor turned back to the image of the fob watch on the floor. "This is bad. And when I say it's bad, it's not just a boatload of bad or a planet worth of bad. This is bad with a capital B.A.D.: a galaxy worth of bad with a TARDIS worth of bad on top."

"Y'know, I'm not stupid," Mickey said, "but I don't know what the heck you're talkin' about. What's bad, and what does a watch have to do with it?"

The Doctor sighed and pointed to the watch again. "That, right there, that contains me. The Chameleon Arch not only changes my species but stores my Time Lord consciousness within that watch for safe keeping."

"Well, if you're there," Mickey asked dubiously, "who's that out there in the garage? You said it was you."

"It is… sort of. A human brain can't contain a Time Lord consciousness. It would burn up from the inside out. That person there in the garage is me… but not me. He has none of my memories, none of my abilities, none of my genetics… everything that would make him a Time Lord is gone." He stood up and walked to the monitor. "The TARDIS will have produced an entire backstory, invented an entire life history for me and integrated me in society. That's who I'll remember, that's who I'll think I am, that's who I'll be… not me. Of course that's assuming…" His voice dwindled off.

"Assuming what?" Rose asked in a quiet voice.

He turned to her. She was standing on the other side of the console with her arms crossed in front of her as if she was hugging herself.

He flipped some switches. The console room's lights turned back on, and the hologram of the previous TARDIS console room faded. "That's assuming that the TARDIS was capable of creating an identity for me at that point," he told her. "It's clear that whatever happened to me was a crisis I couldn't handle on my own. That's why the TARDIS took matters into her own hands, so to speak. But the TARDIS had also been injured. The Cloister Bell, the mauve lights… not to mention she locked me out. She wouldn't have done that if something catastrophic hadn't happened to her."

"You told me about the Cloister Bell," Mickey said, "but what're the mauve lights about?"

"Mauve is the universal color of emergencies," Rose told him.

"Mauve? Whatever happened to red?"

Rose shook her head. "Later, Mick." She turned the Doctor. "So, if I understand this right, we have an injured TARDIS, and a Time Lord who isn't a Time Lord anymore."

"And can't change back until we get access to the watch," the Doctor said. "And the real question is: what injured both of us?"

"And why did it take the TARDIS so long to send out a distress signal?" Rose asked. "You said the TARDIS was set to arrive on New Year's, which means it arrived while we were still here. Why didn't we get a distress call then, or while we were at the school?"

"She must have been so badly injured she was too weak to send out a signal until now," the Doctor answered.

Mickey shook his head. "I'm still missing something. Why is this such a crisis? You said the TARDIS can heal itself, so why does it need us? Not only that, but we know you eventually got back to normal. I mean, you aren't still stuck as a human. You're right here."

"Time doesn't work that way, particularly for Time Lords," the Doctor told him. "What is happening to him now is happening. Whatever we do here and now will affect that."

"But wouldn't us doing anything to change what happened create a paradox or something?" Rose asked.

"Yes. Or no," he told her. "I don't remember any of this, so I don't know if we are risking changing things or if we were originally part of events. But things are different for Time Lords. It's possible for a Time Lord to make changes in his own timeline without creating a paradox. Not to mention that the TARDIS herself called us back. That more than anything else tells me that she needs us to help." He shook his head. "I need more information. Rose, you told me that you saw photos of me from events I don't remember. I'm going to have to retrace my steps to get more information."

Rose nodded, and then her brow furrowed. "Hang on. _You_ are going to have to retrace your steps? Don't you mean _we_ have to retrace your steps?"

"No," he said. "I want, no, I _need_ you to stay here."

She stared at him in shock. "What? Why?"

"Rose, I am out there alone," he said. "Physically I might be human, I may even think I'm human, but I'm really not. I need someone to watch over me, make sure I don't get in trouble, make sure I don't hurt anyone, make sure I don't get involved in big, historical events, that sort of thing."

"How am I supposed to do that if I can't even let you see me?"

He gritted his teeth and rubbed his forehead vigorously. "I don't see a way around it. You'll have to get to know me. According to Mickey, on some level I remember you. I'll instinctively trust you. That should make things, well perhaps not easy, but easier."

At the look on her face, a look that was a combination of doubt and worry and nervousness, he suddenly remembered the conversation he had had with her after she had met Sarah Jane.

_"You just leave us behind…"_

And almost immediately after telling her he wouldn't, he had. And on an abandoned spaceship in the future no less.

No wonder she didn't believe him. Particularly because she was at home. She had to believe he wasn't going to come back for her.

"I'm coming back," he promised. "I told you, I'm not leaving you behind. This is just temporary. And I'm leaving you with me." Despite his words, she still looked doubtful. "How can I prove…" he said to himself. He glanced around the room. And spotted Mickey. "Mr. Mickey!"

"What?" A suspicious look crossed Mickey's face.

"You'll help me out, won't you?"

"I guess," Mickey answered slowly.

"There, you see!" the Doctor said. He gave them each a bright smile. "That solves everything!"

They stared at him blankly.

"What do you mean?" Rose asked. "What does it solve?"

"Mickey can come with_ me_, while you can stay here with, well, me," the Doctor told her.

"What?" she asked incredulously.

At the same time Mickey said, "Now wait a minute…"

"This way," the Doctor continued to Rose, cutting off Mickey's objections, "you know I'll be back. Since you know there's no way I'd _ever_ want to travel with Mickey permanently."

"Oi!" Mickey interjected.

"So while you stay here, keeping me from getting into trouble," the Doctor said, "Mickey and I will be trying to figure out how to solve whatever it is that's going on." He flashed her another bright smile. "Besides, Time Machine. I'll be back before you know it. I can be back ten seconds after I've left."

"If you're going to be back in ten seconds," she said, "why do I need to stay?"

"Well…" He took a deep breath and let it out in a rush. He grimaced and yanked on one ear. It was one of his many tells in this body for not wanting to admit something, but it was something he couldn't seem to control. "Just in case I'm late," he said.

Rose stared at him, shaking her head slightly in disbelief. "So when's this all supposed to happen?" she asked.

"As soon as possible," he told her. "Preferably now. No better time than the present, as they say. Now that we know more about what's going on and have a plan of action, the TARDIS should let us take off." He shrugged apologetically. "Sooner we go, sooner we can get back."

Rose nodded. "S'pose I should go… get my stuff."

Troubled by the way the conversation had gone, the Doctor watched her walk out of the room. After she had left, he turned back to the controls, only to see Mickey staring at him incredulously. The younger man opened his mouth to say something, and then abruptly shut it.

"What?" the Doctor asked.

Mickey rolled his eyes. "And you think I'm thick. If you don't know, nothin' I say is gonna change that," he said and followed Rose out of the room.

~oOo~

When Mickey got to Rose's bedroom, she was pulling t-shirts and jeans out of her dresser and tossing them onto the bed.

"Wanna pull my rucksack out of the cupboard for me, Mick?" she asked without turning.

"Is that all you're gonna say?" he asked as he walked across the room. He pulled the bag out and put it on the bed next to her clothes.

"What am I supposed to say?" she asked.

"Uh, I dunno, maybe that he's bein' a stupid twat leavin' you here?"

"And what good would that do?" She opened another drawer and pulled out underclothes and socks. "Besides, he's right. I should stay here."

"You're kiddin', right?"

"No." She crossed to the bed and started to shove the clothes into her rucksack.

"Are you ever gonna stop defending him?" he asked.

"He's got a point. Someone really should be here to make sure _he_ doesn't get in trouble."

"He's been here six months and the planet hasn't blown up yet. What makes now any different?"

Rose didn't answer. Instead she walked into the en suite. Mickey followed her. He watched as she loaded her makeup into a bright pink toiletries bag.

"C'mon, what makes now any different?"

She ignored him. Once she had finished, she picked up the bag and pushed passed him.

"Rose, talk to me," Mickey urged.

She angrily shoved the bag into the rucksack. "What do you want me to say? That I don't want to stay here? Alright, I don't want to stay!" She tried to zip up the pack and the zipper got stuck. "Damn it!" she said as she tried to force it. "It doesn't want to close!"

Mickey gently pushed her away and easily zipped it up. With a heavy sigh, Rose sank down on the edge of the bed and put her head in her hands.

"I don't want to stay here," she said again.

"Well, I don't want to go with him."

Rose gasped and finally turned to face him. "Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot about that."

"Y'know, if I don't go with him, maybe he won't make you stay here."

"If he doesn't want me with him, I don't want to be here either, whatever his reasons," she told him. "But he needs someone."

"Sarah Jane said he just wants an entourage to show off to," he said.

Rose shook her head. "She was wrong. 'S more than that. He doesn't just want someone with him. He _needs_ someone with him. He doesn't do well alone."

"Yeah, I've seen how much trouble he gets into with someone. What must happen when he's by himself?"

"Evidently he ends up having to have the TARDIS turn him human," she said.

Mickey began to chuckle. "You realize what this means, don't you? You're supposed to babysit him."

She laughed and bumped his shoulder with hers. "So are you!" she answered. She sighed. "How am I supposed to do this? It's gonna look awfully suspicious if I just start following him around."

"Yeah, you could get arrested as a stalker!" he said, still laughing. "I dunno, Rose. Maybe you could go undercover again, the way you did at the school."

She rolled her eyes. "I really don't think he needs a dinner lady, Mick," she told him. Then she paused thoughtfully. "But you're right. I could go undercover. But not as a dinner lady. Wasn't the garage needing more help in the office?"

"Yeah, they were," he said.

"If I could get a job there, I'd have a way to keep an eye on him without him knowing about it." She laughed ruefully. "Mum would be thrilled to have me back and working at the garage. She's hated me traveling with the Doctor. She even thought the shop was giving me 'airs and graces'."

"Just wait till she finds out that the only reason you're doin' it is to keep an eye on the Doctor," Mickey said. "And not this one either. Maybe I do want to be gone."

She laughed again and then grew serious. "Do you mind staying with him?"

"I have to admit I'm not happy about it," he answered. "But I'll do it. But for you. Not for him."

"Thanks, Mick."

~oOo~

The Doctor was bent over the controls when he heard Rose and Mickey reenter the console room. "Looks like she'll let us take off now," he told them.

"Then it's time for me to go, yeah?" Rose asked.

He looked up and at the sight of her his hearts squeezed painfully. She had a huge rucksack slung over one shoulder. Not for the first time he regretted the necessity of making her stay. "Looks like you're moving out," he said lightly. "I said ten seconds."

"You also said you might be late," she reminded him. "This is just in case." After an awkward pause she continued. "Well, I guess I'd better go." She made her way out the door, and they followed her out.

Once outside, Mickey gave her a kiss on the cheek. "Don't worry, I'll take care of him for you," he whispered to her.

She pulled him into a tight hug. "Thanks," she whispered back.

As Mickey returned to the TARDIS, Rose turned to the Doctor. "Ten seconds," he promised.

She bit her lip and nodded and then gave him a forced smile. "Ten seconds. I'm gonna hold you to that."

He smiled back, and they stood there awkwardly for a moment. And then he remembered something. "Oh, I almost forgot," he said, reaching deep into his pocket. He pulled out a white cube approximately the side of his fist and handed it to her.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Instructions. Just in case," he said. "There's a tiny button on the bottom."

As she turned it over to look, he was suddenly seized by an almost overwhelming desire to kiss her goodbye as Mickey had. The Doctor shoved the impulse away from him.

"See you later," he said instead.

She looked up and gave him a small grin. "Not if I see you first."

Knowing if he didn't go soon he wouldn't go at all, he turned and rushed back into the TARDIS. As he crossed to the console, the door closed behind him.

Mickey sat back on the jump seat, arms crossed, waiting for him.

"I can't _believe_ you're actually doin' it," he said. "You're leavin' Rose behind." He shook his head in disbelief. "And you used to call me an idiot. Who's the idiot now?"

The Doctor didn't reply. Instead, with a jerk on the controls, he sent them into the Time Vortex.

~oOo~

John wandered the aisles of the tiny Tesco Express on his way home from the garage. The selection was limited, but the store had the advantage of being just down the street from the auto shop and he rarely if ever needed anything that they didn't have.

It was still fairly early, not quite half three, but he had finished up the repairs on the Vectra and didn't want to start on another car. Tomorrow would be soon enough. Besides, it was supposed to be his day off, so once he had put his tools away—unlike some of the other stupid apes that worked there—he locked up and headed out. He had stopped by Tesco's on a whim because he had been planning on a takeaway curry for tea rather than anything he could get at the store.

He tossed a few more items in the shopping basket to join the tea and milk already there and made his way back to the front of the store. Unlike usual, there was no queue and he went directly to the checkout counter. The cashier was someone he knew, a pretty brunette somewhere in her mid-thirties. He gave her a grin as he put the basket on the counter.

"John, two days in a row!" she said, giving him a bright grin back. "That's rare for you."

"Unexpected houseguest, Beth," he told her. "Didn't have anything in she might like."

Beth's smile faltered. "She?" she asked.

"Yeah, little black cat," he told her. "Wandered in yesterday."

Beth's grin returned. "You've got a cat? I should have guessed from the tuna and the sardines."

"No, I don't have a cat," he informed her. "She's not staying."

"If you feed her, you won't be able to get rid of her," Beth warned. "Especially if you feed her this stuff. You know we do have cat food."

He shuddered. "Wouldn't feed that stuff to a barnysnape."

"A barnysnape? Is that something from Harry Potter?"

His brow furrowed in confusion. "Is that what I said?" he asked. "A barnysnape?" He shook his head to clear it. "Must be from Harry Potter. Sure sounds like it at least. But I meant to say I wouldn't feed it to a dog."

He paid for his purchases and started towards the door. Then he stopped and turned back. "Beth, I'm looking for a girl," he said.

Beth raised her eyebrows in surprise, an expression that quickly turned into a smirk. "Really?" she asked flirtatiously. "Any specific one?"

"Yeah," he said. "I don't know her name but she's yay high," he held his hand up a little over his shoulder, "long blonde hair, maybe a decade younger than you? Wears hoop earrings?"

She scowled. "No," she said shortly. "I don't know anyone like that."

"Well, if you see someone like that, will you let me know?"

"Not bloody likely," she muttered under her breath. At his expectant expression, she let out a huff of frustration. "Okay, all right," she said.

He gave her a wide grin. "Fantastic."

~oOo~

As the sound of the TARDIS's engines echoed through the neighborhood and slowly faded away, Rose watched as the TARDIS disappeared before her eyes.

It felt so wrong for it to leave without her.

"Ten seconds," she whispered. "You said ten seconds, Doctor. One. Two. Three…"

But after ten seconds it stubbornly stayed gone.

"Alright, ten more. One. Two. Three. Four…"

Still gone. She felt a wave of empathy for Sarah Jane. Until this moment she hadn't truly understood what the older woman must have felt when she had been left behind. Even the Doctor sending her away from the Game Station hadn't felt like this.

With a rush Rose wondered if this was a little like what her mother felt whenever the TARDIS left with her aboard, wondering if when the TARDIS disappeared whether it would ever come back.

She waited several more minutes but the TARDIS didn't return, so she shouldered her pack and slowly began the walk back to her mum's flat.

~oOo~

As John crossed the courtyard to his building, in the distance he heard the rough sound of engines. He stopped in his tracks. He frowned. There was something familiar about the sound, something he couldn't place. Before he could identify it, the noise slowly faded away.

"Well, whatever it was," he said to himself, "it sure needs a tune up."


	7. Chapter 6

**Chapter Six**

For the second time in two days Rose made her way across the Estate. The weather was hot and muggy, warmer than usual for July, and before she had arrived at Bucknall House she was drenched in sweat.

Still, instead of rushing to the relative cool of the building, she slowed with every step, dreading the inescapable conversation with her mother. Not necessarily about why she was back, although that was part of it, but why she was back alone. And with most of her stuff.

How would she explain the Doctor leaving her here in a way that made sense to her mum? She only partially understood it herself. And how could she tell her she had no idea how long she'd be here? How to avoid her mother's gloating, the pressure to stay, the inevitable "I told you so" if she let her insecurities slip about being left behind? Because she couldn't talk about her fears about being left behind without mentioning Sarah Jane and Reinette, and knowing about them would in her mother's mind confirm every bad thing she had ever thought about the Doctor since they had met.

And how could she avoid explaining that the person she knew as John was really the Doctor? Despite Jackie being one of the worst gossips on the Estate, she knew her mother had never let the Doctor's true identity as a time traveling alien slip. But if her mum met John again, and Rose had no doubt she would, how could she prevent her mother saying something to him about it?

She groaned. Not only was she hot and sweaty, now she was developing a massive headache.

Rose was so wrapped up in her thoughts that she arrived at her mother's flat without realizing it. She pulled her key out of her pocket and let herself in.

"Mum," she called, closing the door behind her. "Mum, I'm back."

"I'm in the lounge," her mother called back.

Rose dropped her rucksack in her old bedroom before making her way to the back of the flat. She found her mother sitting on the sofa, nursing a cup of tea while the telly blared. Rose moved a stack of gossip magazines off one of the chairs to the coffee table before sitting down herself.

"I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it," Jackie said. "The Doctor said you'd be back today. So where is himself then?"

"Back in the TARDIS with Mickey," Rose answered evasively. "Mum, is it okay if I stay here for a couple of days?"

"Why?" her mother asked suspiciously. "What's goin' on?"

Before Rose could answer, the phone rang. As Jackie picked up, Rose sighed in relief.

"Stuart!" Jackie exclaimed and then her voice lowered suggestively. "Yeah, of course I had a good time last night. A real good time…"

Despite being grateful for the interruption, Rose rolled her eyes. "Saved by the bell," she muttered under her breath. "And Stuart."

As her mother left the room to talk in private, Rose grabbed the remote control and flipped through the television stations. Only then she remembered it was Sunday afternoon. Nothing on. Nothing of interest at any rate. She had been back at the flat a total of five minutes and she was bored already. She snapped off the telly just as her mother reentered the room.

"I'm goin' out with Stuart tonight," Jackie told her. "He's comin' to pick me up in a half an hour." Then she frowned. "Unless you need me to stay home, Rose. Because I will if you need me."

Rose shook her head. "No, you go." She gave her mum a smile. "Have a good time."

"Oh, I will," Jackie told her with a cheeky grin.

As her mother left the room to get ready for her date, Rose returned to her bedroom. She began to pull her things out of her bag only to find the odd cube the Doctor had given her. After the TARDIS had left, she had jammed it in the bag and hadn't given it another thought.

She closed the door to the room before sinking down on the bed and flipping the switch on the bottom. When she turned it right side up again, a six inch hologram of the Doctor appeared. He had obviously recorded it while she was getting ready to go; he was wearing the same white shirt and brown tie with the light blue diamonds on it he had been wearing earlier. He had the top two buttons done up on his jacket, and his hands were jammed deeply in his trouser pockets.

"Rose, if you're watching this, it means I've been gone longer than ten seconds," he said. "I'm really sorry about that. I truly meant to come back in ten seconds. All I can say is that maybe whatever is going on with his TARDIS is beginning to affect mine."

"Or maybe you're just a lousy driver," she said under her breath.

"Now Rose, in this situation there are a number of things to remember," the Doctor's hologram continued. "First of all, like I said before, he's not me. Well, he is, but in all the important ways he isn't. The TARDIS will have given him a completely new identity, and he will believe that that's who he is. It's essential to let him continue to believe it. According to Mickey, he has some residual memory of you, but that doesn't mean he knows who he really is—which is me—or who you are and how he knows you. If you end up having direct contact with him, it's essential that you give him as little information as possible so that he doesn't begin to suspect he isn't who he thinks he is, because if he does begin to suspect he isn't who he thinks he is, he could have a crisis of identity which could make this whole bad situation a hundred times worse. Is that clear?"

"As mud," she said.

"Second, very important, based on where he is in his timeline, this will be after we dealt with the Nestene Consciousness but before we traveled together. You mustn't let slip anything about our future together. Maintain the timelines at all cost. After all this is over, because of our involvement he'll have to forget all of this happened. That will be much harder if he knows even the slightest detail of our adventures together.

"C, keep him away from major historical events. As a human, he won't have the insight into the flow of time that I do normally, and when I get back I don't need to be cleaning up messes in the timeline that I've created by mucking about while I'm human."

Rose rolled her eyes. "Okay, keep him away from all the world-changing events that happen on the Estate every day."

"Fifth... or… fourth?" The image of the Doctor paused, and Rose could see his forehead furrow thoughtfully. The hologram began to pace. It was an odd sight, seeing him walk back and forth across the surface of the cube. "Fourth," he said decisively after a moment. He pulled a hand out of his pocket and raked it through his hair. "This may be the most important of all. Don't let him hurt anyone," the Doctor said. "I was very volatile when I was him, and obviously being human is just going to make that worse. After all, you know how humans can be. You should, after all, being one yourself, and, well, you know how you can get…"

Rose scowled. "You should be glad you aren't here, because you're just asking for a slap. You know that, don't you?"

"Now this one is fifth. If anything happens to me, him, if I'm on the verge of dying or something, try to get into the TARDIS and get the watch. If she heals a little more, she might let you in. If you do manage to get the watch, then get me to open it. Don't open it yourself. Only I can open it for it to work… the Chameleon Arch will have tied opening it to my genetics. Only by my opening it will it return me to being a Time Lord. But this is only as a last resort. We don't know what's going on yet, why the TARDIS turned me human in the first place, and it might be a greater risk to turning me back than for me to stay human.

"Last, but nowhere near least…" He stopped in his tracks and turned to stare straight at her. It looked like he could see her, like he was looking deeply into her eyes. It was disconcerting, just as it had been when Emergency Program One had played in the TARDIS console room. "Rose, knowing me, I didn't say thank you for taking care of me. Thank you. I know this won't be easy. Hopefully it won't take long for Mickey and me to find out what's going on and get back. If you encounter a situation you think you don't know how to handle, just use your best judgment. I know you'll do what's best. You always do. There's no one in the universe I believe in, no one I trust, more than you. See you soon."

The image of the Doctor froze. Rose sniffed loudly and with her free hand she wiped at her eyes. "Git," she said forcefully. "You're such a jerk. Why can't you say things like that when you're really here, yeah? Why do you have to wait until you're God knows where doing God knows what and will be back God knows when?"

She flicked the switch at the bottom of the cube. The Doctor's image flickered and then disappeared. She placed the cube on the bedside table next to her alarm clock before lying back and staring at the ceiling.

She missed him. He'd been gone all of a half an hour, and despite everything that had happened recently, she already missed him.

"Doctor," she said to the empty room, "get back soon, alright? Just… get back soon."

~oOo~

John carried his tea into the lounge: a curry courtesy of the Chinese takeaway across the street from the garage and a large bottle of still water from Tesco's. He sat down and set the water on the coffee table before taking a bite of the curry.

The food was cold. But what else could he expect? When he had gotten back to the flat, instead of eating he had immediately returned to the computer. As he did every day, he had spent hours there scanning the online newspapers and checking the most recent missing persons reports in the Scotland Yard database. As he had expected, there was nothing. Nothing new, nothing old, nothing in the numerous stories and files that could remotely be referring to him. But he had had to check, just in case. You never knew.

And he hadn't made any progress in finding information about the girl, either. No one seemed to know who she was. In addition to his boss's wife and Beth at Tesco's, he'd also asked the cashier at the takeaway and the two biggest gossips in his building, Irene and Gladys. No luck from any of them. He was beginning to think he imagined her. Oh, there had been someone with blonde hair at the garage, he was sure of that, Mudali had seen her as well. But that didn't mean it was _her_. _She _probably didn't even exist. Only wishful thinking had made him think that the blonde and the girl from his dreams were one and the same.

He picked up the television remote and turned on a movie to watch while he ate. He didn't really want to watch telly, but he needed some sort of noise in the place. The flat was always too quiet otherwise. For some reason when he was at home he always expected to hear a background hum, beyond what the refrigerator and other electrical equipment provided. Without the sound of the television going, the flat was silent. It just served to emphasize how empty it was.

And it _was_ empty. No one was ever there, other than him. No one ever visited. Not that he ever invited anyone, of course, but still.

Even the cat wasn't there.

John had put her out when he had left for work that morning. Although he didn't want to admit it, when he had gotten home he had felt a twinge of disappointment when he had realized that the cat hadn't returned. On some level he had hoped that she'd be there. Expected it even.

But why would he expect that the cat would be interested in being part of his life? No one else was.

"Now you're just feelin' sorry for yourself," John said aloud. He took a swig from the bottle of water and wished he had thought to pick up something stronger. Anything to rid himself of his foul mood. Even beer wouldn't cut it right now. He thought about going out, but he wasn't in the mood for a pub. Despite feeling lonely and sorry for himself, he detested the thought of sitting at a bar with a bunch of drunken, stupid apes.

"Beer it is then," he said to himself.

He retrieved the rest of the pack from the kitchen, sat back down on the sofa, and slowly began the process of getting as drunk as he could.

~oOo~

Hot and sweaty and more than slightly disoriented, Rose woke up from a deep sleep not certain where she was. It wasn't the first time she had woken up like that, not remembering where she had been when she had fallen asleep. And not because of her clubbing days. It seemed like a regular occurrence when traveling with the Doctor. She had woken up in as diverse places as the TARDIS console room, a dank cave on a planet in the distant past, and a filthy jail cell on a space station far in the future. As far as she knew she could be anywhere, and any when, in the universe.

"Doctor?" she whispered, yawning. "Doctor, where are we?" And then she remembered that the Doctor wasn't there. And that she was in her old bedroom in her mum's flat.

The room was stifling. The vents had never properly worked, and when the door was closed her room was often uncomfortably hot in the summer and freezing in the winter.

Rose got up, combing her fingers through her hair as she crossed the room and opened the door. Across the hall, the door to her mother's bedroom was closed. From behind it she could hear someone talking. She couldn't hear what was being said, but the voice was distinctly male. Her mother giggled in response. She and Stuart must not have gone out after all.

So much for hanging out in the lounge, she thought. She really didn't want to overhear them if, or more likely when, they ended up doing more than talking. With a sigh of inevitability, she made sure she had her keys in her pocket and slipped out the door.

To her surprise it was twilight. She must have been asleep for hours.

When she got to the stairwell, instead of going down, she went up, headed to the roof. The roof had always been her place to escape to: when she was having problems in school, when she was fighting with her friends, and particularly when she needed to get away from her mum.

It was empty when she got there. She was always surprised it wasn't used more by the other residents of Bucknall House. She couldn't imagine why. It was quiet, far above the chaos that was the Powell Estate.

She hoisted herself up on a ledge and looked out over the city. Her mouth quirked into a smile at the memory of the last time she had been there. Last time she had been with the Doctor. Her first Doctor. Right after she had gotten home almost a year late and her mother had slapped him.

She looked over at the building across the way and wondered if he was there. Even if he wasn't, he'd certainly be at the garage tomorrow. She'd see him again, something she hadn't dared hope for. She'd really see him again. Even though according to the Doctor he wasn't really him and wouldn't properly remember her, she'd still be able to see him again.

And for the first time since she had been left behind, she thought that maybe being left here wouldn't be all bad.

~oOo~

John drained the can and roughly put it on the table next to four other empties. After five beers finished over the course of the evening he was definitely feeling it, but he wasn't nearly drunk enough, he decided. Despite the noises outside, despite the hum of the refrigerator and the voices emanating from the telly, the flat was too quiet. And too small. The rooms were drab and dull and far, far too small.

Really, he thought, the block of flats was too small. The Estate was too small.

"Even bloody London is too small," he said irritably.

But there was one place that he had found didn't feel too small.

He grabbed another beer and popped the top as he headed out of the flat.

Brandon House, the building his flat was in, was one of the tallest buildings on the Powell Estate and, by extension, Peckham. On clear days from the roof of the rundown block of flats you could see downtown London, but on clear nights you could see the stars. And thankfully tonight was one of those nights.

There was no moon and, in spite of the lights of the city, the stars were brilliant, so large he felt he could almost touch them. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It was only here, under the stars, that he didn't feel the weight of not knowing who he was or the claustrophobia of the small flat in the city. It was only here that he felt even a semblance of peace.

He placed the can of beer down on the ledge and leaned against it, arms crossed in front of his chest. Between the beer and the stars, he felt relaxed for the first time in what seemed like ages. Up here there was no job, no flat, no beans on toast… nothing but him and the stars.

Eventually he turned from the sky to take in his surroundings. There was a slight breeze, a little cool but welcome after the heat of the day. In the distance he could hear the quiet sounds of music playing and laughter, but they weren't loud enough to disturb him. And he could see the silhouette of someone on the roof of a nearby building. He chuckled. He wasn't the only one who felt the need to take refuge on a roof up above the city.

As he watched, the other person left, to reenter the building and rejoin the world of jobs and beans on toast, but he stayed at his post, watching the stars and breathing in the cool night air.

Breathing in freedom.

~oOo~

_Rose ran for her life down the narrow, paneled hall of 10 Downing Street. On either side of her, plastic hands emerged from doorways, grabbing at her as she passed._

_"Doctor!" she screamed. "Doctor, where are you?"_

_She glanced behind her. A host of shop dummies, arms outstretched, were gaining on her. She put on speed. _

_Finally she could see the end. She rounded the corner—and stopped short. Panting and heart pounding, she looked around in amazement. Cement walls had replaced wood. _

_She was in the bunker in Utah._

_"Doctor!" she yelled again. "Doctor, where are you?"_

_Suddenly she saw a thick rope hanging in front of her. She grabbed it—and the floor dropped out from under her. _

_She found herself hanging from a barrage balloon over London during the Blitz. The rope cut into her hands while her feet dangled in space far above the ground. Explosions lit up the night, revealing tree people as tall as Big Ben towering over the city. Ghostlike Gelth swirled around her, taunting her. _

_Her surroundings shifted yet again. Still hanging from the rope, she was now in the cavernous space under the London Eye. She quickly looked around and spotted the Doctor standing on the edge of a ledge, dwarfed by the Slitheen that surrounded him. Their green skin glowed with an unearthly hue in the darkness. _

_"Doctor!" _

_She swung back and forth, gaining enough momentum to knock the Slitheen into the vat of living plastic below. As she swung back, dangerously over the vat, she slipped and strong, leather-clad arms caught her. She clung to him, burying her face in his shoulder._

_"Jeopardy friendly, you are," he whispered into her hair. "But absolutely fantastic."_

_"I missed you," she told him. "I missed you so much."_

_He tilted her chin up and looked deeply into her eyes. "I'm right here, Rose Tyler. And I'm not goin' anywhere."_

The harsh, repetitive blare of the alarm broke through Rose's dream. She groaned in protest. As the dream faded, she instinctively slammed a hand on the clock as she had so many times before, first for school, and then while working.

Yawning, she blearily opened her eyes and glanced at the clock. Half seven. She'd only had about five hours of sleep. She had gone to bed very late last night, or very early this morning, after staying on the roof until she was certain her mother and Stuart were asleep.

But she had to get up. She had to apply for a job.

She winced. She liked to think of it as going undercover, but it was really getting a job. She hadn't applied for a job in years. She hadn't even had a job in years, not since Henrik's had blown up.

Rose forced herself out of bed and out of her room. Her mother's bedroom door was closed, so she tiptoed to the bathroom for a shower. Even after she had gotten dressed, in the nicest top and trousers she had at the flat, she found that Jackie still wasn't up. Relieved to be able to once again postpone talking to her mother, she left a note saying she'd be back later and headed out.

As she made her way down the stairs and across the courtyard, butterflies fluttered in her stomach at the thought of seeing him again. It's not him, she told herself. It's the Doctor, but not. The Doctor said that in every important way, it's not him. Besides, you might not even see him today. In fact, the Doctor could come back and you might not see _him_ at all.

But the butterflies ignored her.

Finally Rose stood across the street from the garage. The shop was already open, and she could see that each of its bays was filled with vehicles in various stages of being repaired. To her disappointment, she couldn't spot him among any of the mechanics working on the cars.

She closed her eyes for a moment and silently rehearsed what she'd say. Finally she nodded.

"I can do this," she told herself firmly.

A bell attached to the door rang as she walked inside the office. To her relief, the same woman was behind the desk as had been there on Saturday. Good, she thought. That would make things easier.

There were already a half a dozen people queued up in front of the desk, and half again as many sitting on the uncomfortable looking vinyl chairs in the waiting area. She joined the queue, and when it was her turn she stepped up to the desk. The woman looked up at her expectantly.

"Hello, Mrs. Mudali? My name's Rose. Rose Tyler," she began. "I was in the other day, Saturday, with Mickey Smith, and when I was here I heard you say that you needed more help at the desk, and if you have an opening, I want to apply for the job." Before Mrs. Mudali could respond, Rose continued in a rush. "Now I don't have any A-levels and my CV is a bit out of date, but I got really high scores on my GCSEs and I have worked at a shop before. If you hire me, I promise I'll work really, really hard."

Crossing her arms in front of her and resting them on her very pregnant belly, Mrs. Mudali cocked her head and scrutinized her. Her brow furrowed as she frowned. Rose shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot.

"Uh, do you need me to fill out a form or something?" Rose asked nervously. "Or references? You need references, yeah? I can get you some if you want." She silently scanned her memory, trying to figure out if she still knew anyone who would vouch for her. As she drew a blank, she missed having access to the Doctor's psychic paper. This all would have been so easy with it, she thought. No wonder he used it so often.

After a moment the older woman's mouth twisted into a small smile. "I've been praying for weeks for someone to come in here and offer to help. I was just trying to figure out which of the gods sent you to me before I could even advertise for another clerk. Perhaps Lakshmi. She has been very kind to us lately."

"Mrs. Mudali, does that mean I've got the job?"

"Call me Abhirati, and yes, you have the job," the other woman said. "Your name is Rose, right?" Rose nodded. "How soon can you start?"

"How's five minutes ago?" Rose asked. She bit her lower lip as she grinned.

Abhirati leaned back in her chair and grinned back. "Heavenly. It sounds absolutely heavenly."

~oOo~

Prickles. That was his first thought. Tiny pinpricks on his fingers. It was enough to wake him from a sound sleep, but not enough to bother him. What bothered him was the pounding in his temples and more than a little queasiness. Definitely shouldn't have had that last beer, he told himself. Or probably the two before it either.

Sleep. That's what he needed. More sleep. He began to drift off again—and the prickles turned needle-sharp and sank deeply into his hand.

"Ow!" John jerked his hand back and something furry rubbed against his face.

And purred.

He opened one eye. "So you came back, did you?"

The cat butted his face with her forehead again.

"I suppose you're hungry."

The purring grew louder and more insistent.

"Alright, I'm getting up," he said. When he didn't move, the cat butted him harder. "Okay, okay," he protested. "What time is it anyway?" He looked at the clock next to the bed and swore. "I'm late!"

He jumped out of bed and got ready for work as quickly as he could, but just before he left he took the time to open one of the cans of tuna for the cat.

"Thanks for wakin' me up," he said as he put the open can on the floor. "I owe you one. But you're still not movin' in."

~oOo~

Rose spent the rest of the morning learning the ropes of working in the office at the garage. And once she got over the pervasive odors of petrol and motor oil, the job wasn't that bad. It was a combination of customer service and paperwork: answering the phone, scheduling appointments, filing and handling the cash register. Nothing she hadn't done in previous jobs at one point or another.

The one disappointment was that John wasn't there, but she didn't know how to ask why. No one knew she knew him—not even him—and she knew that it would be suspicious if she started asking questions about where he was.

By lunchtime the waiting room was empty, and Abhirati decided Rose was doing well enough that she could leave for a few minutes to do a couple of errands.

"If there are any problems you can ring my mobile," Abhirati said as she pulled her handbag out of the desk and walked to the door. "Or, better yet, get my husband." She laughed. "With you here he hasn't done a single thing today." She stopped and turned back. "Are you sure you're going to be alright here by yourself?"

"I'll be fine," Rose assured her.

Abhirati nodded and headed out, and the bell on the door jangled as it shut behind her.

Rose picked up a pile of invoices. As she began to file them in the filing cabinet at the back of the room, behind her the bell jangled again. And before she even heard John's voice, her skin tingled with a jolt of awareness.

"Abhirati, sorry I'm late…" His voice trailed off.

Rose slowly turned. He was staring at her, his mouth slightly open, shock written all over his face. Their eyes met.

"It's you," he whispered.


	8. Chapter 7

**a/n: Things have been pretty crazy in RL lately, and I've gotten behind on answering my reviews. If you've written a review and I haven't responded, I want you to know that I read them all and I really appreciate each and every one I receive. Thanks for reading.**

* * *

**Chapter Seven**

_The Doctor rushed back into the TARDIS. As he crossed to the console, the door closed behind him. _

_Mickey sat back on the jump seat, arms crossed, waiting for him._

_"I can't believe you're actually doin' it," he said. "You're leavin' Rose behind." He shook his head in disbelief. "And you used to call me an idiot. Who's the idiot now?"_

_The Doctor didn't reply. Instead, with a jerk on the controls, he sent them into the Time Vortex._

While the TARDIS floated in the Vortex, the Doctor rushed around the console, pressing random buttons and flipping random switches on the control panels. It was all completely unnecessary, a centuries-old habit he had developed as a distraction technique that he used when there was something he didn't want to deal with.

As he continued to fiddle with the controls, he could feel Mickey's eyes on him as the younger man waited for him to say something. But he didn't want to talk about it, didn't even want to think about how wrong it felt leaving Rose behind for any reason. Oh, he knew it had been the only logical course of action. If the TARDIS had turned his past self human, particularly if she had done it without his knowledge or input, the crisis must have been extremely grave, much more so than he had told Rose and Mickey. And who better than to watch over his younger self than Rose, the person he trusted, the person he believed in, the person he… cared about more than anyone else.

No, there had been no other choice.

But not having her here, leaving her behind on the Estate, felt so wrong. On more levels than he wanted to admit, even to himself.

She had been gone less than five minutes and already he missed her.

"Now what we have to do is figure out where I was, what I was doing immediately before the TARDIS landed back on the Estate," he said in a rush as he continued to circle the console. He had discovered fairly quickly after his regeneration that speaking at breakneck speed helped him focus on the task at hand, and just as fiddling with the controls did, it had the added benefit of distracting him from anything he didn't want to think about. "And since we have no information as to what I was doing then, we'll have to—"

"I didn't want to come, you know," Mickey blurted out, interrupting him.

The Doctor stopped in his tracks. He looked up at him in surprise. "What?"

"I didn't want to come," Mickey said again, this time more forcefully.

"Why not?" he asked.

With that, it was as if a dam had burst within the younger man. "You aren't half thick, you know that?" he said angrily. "After what happened on that spaceship… We almost got killed! And for what? So you could shag some French royalty, maybe get another notch on your bedpost? What is it with you? Are you shaggin' your way through time and space? You got a list or somethin'? Who's next? Helen of Troy? How about Madame Curie? Do you have a famous scientist on your list yet? How 'bout an actress like Marilyn Monroe? Or a singer like Janis Joplin? Nah, you probably already did her. That's probably how you got the coat you're always on about."

"That's enough," he said coldly, in a low, dangerous voice that had been known to stop Daleks in their tracks.

Mickey ignored him. "After all, you've only got so many companions. After Sarah Jane and Rose, you gotta go out for a bit of variety. Speakin' of variety, was Captain Cheesecake on your list? You do him too?"

"That's enough," he warned, a little more loudly.

"Or what?" Mickey said defiantly. "You gonna take me home? Throw me out an airlock? Leave me on a spaceship filled with robots tryin' to kill me for spare parts?"

"That's enough!" the Doctor shouted. "I do not, as you so eloquently put it, shag my way through time and space! And I certainly do not throw people out of airlocks! The TARDIS doesn't even have an airlock!"

"But you did leave us on that spaceship! And Rose 'n me, we almost got killed because of it! Then, first chance you got, you did it again!"

"And first chance I got, I came back!" The Doctor took a deep breath and then continued in a calmer tone. "And I did not shag Reinette."

Mickey glowered at him. "Whether you did or not isn't the point. She was throwing herself at you, and you weren't particularly dodging. You did snog her—"

"_She_ kissed me!" the Doctor interjected.

"And you snogged her right back, and then bragged about it!"

"How do you even know about that?" the Doctor asked incredulously.

"Metal walls… the whole spaceship was like an echo chamber," Mickey answered. "Do you even realize how bad that trip was, not just for me, but for Rose as well?" He started ticking things off on his fingers. "You snog a woman who you had just met as a child not five minutes earlier, you go and get drunk with her at a party while we almost get killed, you leave Rose…you leave _both_ of us stranded on the spaceship in order to save her without having a clue as to how you were gonna get back, _then_ you invite her along in the TARDIS, and that's even after she treated Rose like crap. How do you think that made her feel? But Reinette was only rude to her. You… you treated her like shit. You never would have done that before."

"Before what?" the Doctor demanded, exasperated.

"Before you changed. You may have been a complete arse to me back then, callin' me 'Mickey the Idiot', always tryin' to wind me up, but you always treated Rose well."

The Doctor stared at him, more than a little shocked at the accusation. "I'm the same man I was, Mickey," he said less heatedly.

"But are you though? I don't think so," Mickey said. "Back then, you always took care of her. You even sent her back home once to keep her safe. But now…"

"Is that what Rose thinks too?" the Doctor asked quietly. "That I'm not the same man I was?"

"No," Mickey admitted. "She's still defending you, like she always has. But you really, really hurt her. I may not have been the best boyfriend, but I never treated her like you just did. Last person who treated her like that was Jimmy. Why she stuck around with him as long as she did I'll never understand. But as bad as he was, I think what you did was worse."

The Doctor stared unseeing at the console in front of him. For several long moments the only sound in the console room was that of the rise and fall of the Time Rotor.

"If you didn't want to come, Mickey," the Doctor said eventually, "why did you?"

"For Rose," he answered. "She's worried about you. Doesn't think you should travel alone."

The Doctor laughed ruefully, a quiet, humorless sound. "She's probably right. She usually is."

"She cares about you, you know," Mickey said. "And I think you care about her. Which is why none of this makes any sense."

The Doctor looked up sharply at him. "None of what?"

"All of this: Reinette, me travelin' with the two of you… This may be none of my business but Rose said you two are just friends—"

"We are," the Doctor interjected.

"And that's the part that makes the least sense of all," Mickey said. "Cos you either care about her the way she cares about you or you don't. And if you really care about her the way she cares about you, why aren't the two of you together?"

"The part of this that makes the least sense is why I'm talking to you about any of this!"

Mickey ignored the outburst. "She says you don't do that sort of thing because it would hurt too much afterwards," he continued. "But I don't think that's it. I don't think you do care about her after all. I think you're just a bloody wanker. You're just usin' her, the way you keep her here with you, leadin' her on, knowin' full well how she feels about you."

"You make it sound like she's locked up," the Doctor said sharply, "like I'm holding her prisoner or something. She could leave if she wanted to."

"But she never will and you know that! You're just usin' her, actin' like you care about her one minute and then pushin' her away the next. Either that or…" Mickey stared at him, jaw open.

"Or what?" the Doctor asked.

"Or you really do care about her and you're just afraid to show it," he said slowly. He shook his head in disbelief. "That's it, isn't it? She's right. You do care about her, but you're afraid to do anything about it." His lip curled derisively. "That makes you more than just a wanker—that makes you a cowardly one as well."

As Mickey's words hung between them, the silence in the console room became oppressive. The Doctor's jaw tightened: in anger, in frustration, and in guilt.

"Well, if that's the way you feel," the Doctor said tightly, "we'd best get on with this then so we can get you back home." He began to work his way around the console again, this time actually programming in the next set of coordinates rather than just pretending to do so.

"So what's the plan again?" Mickey asked after a moment.

"Well, we know that whatever happened to me happened between the time I left the two of you and then came back." He spun a dial on one panel, then moved two panels to the left and typed in a complex code before returning to spin the dial again. "So it's just a matter of retracing my steps to see exactly what happened. Once we know what the problem was, and what caused it, then we can figure out how to fix it."

"Okay, so if we are retracing your steps," Mickey said, "how are we gonna do it if you don't remember anything? I mean, where do we start?"

"We start with what Rose said she saw when she visited Clive," he answered. He moved to the opposite side of the console to flip three switches in rapid succession before returning to spin the dial again. "Rose said she had seen pictures of me in places where I don't ever remember going."

"Yeah, the Titanic, the Kennedy assassination, and then, what was it, a volcano or something?"

"Krakatoa," the Doctor answered. "But the question is, why those three places? What's so special about them?" He stopped his motion around the console for a moment and thoughtfully rubbed his chin. "What could possibly link them?"

"Well, they're all on Earth," Mickey said.

The Doctor waved a hand dismissively. "That's not particularly significant. I had just dealt with the Nestene Consciousness so I was already here." His voice drifted off as he frowned thoughtfully. "But why those three places?" he said to himself. "I'd think that of all places I could go, I'd avoid them, not intentionally go there."

"Why?" Mickey asked.

"Why what?"

"Why would you avoid them?" Mickey asked.

"Well, because they're all fixed points," the Doctor answered. "Most things that happen in the universe are in flux, malleable. A change in them will change the flow of history in a limited sense or a finite area but not affect the universe at large. A smaller number are branching points, much like a fork in a road. A decision to turn right rather than left can lead to the creation of an entirely new universe, parallel to the original one. But a fixed point is different. A fixed point is something that has to happen, an incident or event that influences the universe so strongly that it not happening has the potential to unravel time itself. One wrong move, one slight alteration in anything, and the consequences…" His eyes widened and his jaw dropped.

"What?" Mickey asked.

"They're fixed points!" the Doctor said. "That _is_ the connection! For some reason I was intentionally going to events that were fixed points in time!" He rushed around the console in order to finish setting the coordinates.

"Where are we going?"

"To try and prevent me from accidentally ripping apart the cosmos!"

~oOo~

John rushed across the crowded Estate, making his way to the garage. It was noon, and there were cars and people everywhere. Lunchtime, he reminded himself. Everyone and his brother had evidently decided to go out to lunch, and in Peckham no less.

Dammit. He was so late. He didn't ever remember being this late in his life. Admittedly, with his memories stretching back only six months that wasn't saying much, but still.

Forced to stop at a crosswalk just across from the garage, he swore under his breath as he waited for his turn to cross. He could kick himself. Going on a bender on a Sunday night, staying up until half four in the morning when he had to be at work at eight wasn't his brightest move. What was wrong with him? He wasn't a teenager for God's sake.

The light turned green. He rushed across the street and burst through the door to the office. "Abhirati, sorry I'm late…"

His voice trailed off. The young woman behind the desk wasn't Abhirati Mudali. She was easily three inches taller and much thinner than the pregnant office manager, not to mention she had blonde hair, not black.

_Blonde hair. A hand in his. "Run!"_

She turned slowly to face him and their eyes met.

_Blonde hair. Warm brown eyes. A generous mouth._

_A hand in his. _

_"Run!"_

"It's you," he whispered.

And it was. It was the girl he had been dreaming about. And what's more, he saw recognition in her eyes.

She knew him.

_She knew him._

She bit her lip and gave him a quick, shy smile. "Hello," she said.

"Hello." Part of him hoped he knew her well, but another part was afraid that if he asked about it he'd look like an idiot if he was a relative or something. But he had no choice. Besides, it wouldn't be the first time he looked like an idiot. Possibly not even the first time today. "I'm sorry. You look so familiar," he said. "I… know you, right?"

She didn't seem surprised at the question. "Yeah," she answered. "Well, sort of."

"Sort of?"

She hesitated before answering. "We, uh, met a couple of years ago. When Henrik's blew up. I was working there then, and we were both… across the street when it happened."

His forehead wrinkled as he looked inward, trying to recall anything about their meeting.

_A hand in his. "Run."_

There was something more, he knew it, it was just on the edge of his awareness, but every time he tried to grasp it, it flitted away. Finally he shook his head in defeat. "Sorry."

"'S alright," she said. "We only met just the once."

That didn't sound right. Why would he have been dreaming about her so often if they had only met once, and casually at that?

On the other hand, why would she lie?

"What's Henrik's?" he asked.

"A department store. It's up on the high street," she told him. "Well, it was on the high street. It isn't there anymore."

"I suppose not, not if it blew up," he said.

She laughed.

"So… what are you doing here?" he asked curiously.

She grinned at him. "I work here."

"Since when?"

"Since this morning," she replied. Her grin widened and he saw the tip of her tongue peek out the side of her mouth and touch her upper teeth. He wasn't sure he had ever seen anyone smile that way before. Certainly no one had ever smiled that way at him before. He found it slightly distracting.

"You'd know that if you had gotten here on time," she continued. "See what you miss when you're late?"

He blinked at the teasing, and then he grinned. "I'll have to make sure I'm on time from now on."

"You do that," she replied.

The door leading into the garage burst open and the shop owner barreled in. "Abhirati, did Manchester ever—oh, I see you finally decided to show up."

"Sorry about that…" John started.

"Well, see that it doesn't happen again, or you'll find yourself out the door and on the dole," Mudali snapped.

"Empty threat, Mudali, and we both know it," John replied.

Mudali continued as if John hadn't spoken. "Now there's an Infiniti out there and no one can figure out what's wrong with it. I suggest you get your sorry arse out there and get started on it instead of staying in here and chatting up our new receptionist."

"I wasn't…" Out of the corner of his eye, John could see that the girl was biting her lip again, but this time in order to hide a grin. Oh. Maybe he had been.

Mudali headed back out into the garage, and John reluctantly followed him out. As his boss began to point out the car, John held up one finger.

"Just a second," he said.

He turned and stuck his head back in the office. The girl was still standing in the same place, watching him, a small smile on her face. "By the way, my name's John. What's yours?"

The small smile turned into a bright grin. "My name's Rose," she said. "Rose Tyler."

"Nice to meet you, Rose," he said.

She stifled a giggle, and murmured something under her breath.

He stared at her, puzzled. "I beg your pardon?"

She shook her head. "Sorry. Don't mind me. Just… a private joke."

He nodded slowly and headed back into the garage. He must have misheard her, he thought. Because it almost sounded like she had said, _"Run for your life."_


	9. Chapter 8

**Chapter Eight**

Heart pounding, Rose watched as the Doctor—no, _John_, she reminded herself—went back into the garage to get to work. Once she was sure he was gone she began to giggle giddily. When one of the customers in the waiting area looked at her curiously, she quickly slapped her hands over her mouth for a moment to stifle the sound.

It was him. He might not be himself, he might think he was someone else, but it was him.

And somehow, despite whatever had happened to him, on some level he still remembered her.

All of a sudden her knees felt weak, and she sank down onto the chair behind the reception desk. She looked down at her hands. Despite her best efforts to hold them still, they were quivering.

"Look at me. I'm literally shaking," she said aloud. "The Doctor'd probably say it's a reaction to adrenalin or something." She took a deep breath and let it out slowly in order to compose herself.

Before she'd gotten to the shop, she'd had a vague idea about telling him she didn't remember him, but the instant she had seen him looking at her she knew that that'd never work. She'd never be able hide the fact that they knew each other. Despite having been able to con her mother into believing all sorts of things growing up, she'd never fooled him, not for one instant, not about anything. She just wasn't that good an actress.

After seeing him up close, she could see why her mother didn't immediately recognize him, particularly if he hadn't shaved when she had seen him. He had at least a couple day's growth on his face, obscuring the mole on his cheek, not to mention the fact that he clearly hadn't had a haircut in months. It was easily several inches long. Between the hair and the almost-beard, both his nose and his ears looked less prominent. If you add that to the fact that he was wearing a short sleeved denim work shirt rather than a jumper and a leather jacket, he looked like someone else entirely.

But she would have known him anywhere. The shape of his shoulders. The steely blue of his eyes. And that grin. The grin that had always made her heart race.

And his voice. The light tenor, the Northern accent. Mr. Mudali called him "Manchester", evidently because of it. She snickered at the thought. If he only knew how far off he was.

_"If you are an alien, then how come you sound like you're from the North?"_

_"Lots of planets have a North!"_

She leaned across the desk to peek through the door. She could just see him on the far side of the garage. He had his head under the bonnet of the Infiniti. Despite how incongruous it was to see him working on a car, the sight was still incredibly familiar. How many times had she seen him just like that, working on the TARDIS?

As if he knew she was looking at him, he turned his head in her direction. She quickly sat back out of his line of sight. School, she thought in amusement. It was just like being back in school. How often had she been almost caught staring at boys in class?

She needed to focus on something else, she reminded herself. She wasn't supposed to be here flirting with him. She was here to make sure he didn't get into trouble. She had a job to do.

A job! All of a sudden she remembered just where she was. She had a job now, a job she needed to keep if she was going to get close enough to him to watch him, and she was supposed to be working.

Over the next hour she tried her best to concentrate on the work at hand—on filing, on printing up invoices, on answering the phone—but her mind kept on returning to their conversation. Had she told him too much? Flirted too much? Not that she could have stopped herself if she had tried.

Periodically she'd peek into the garage again. She couldn't stop herself, even though there was a risk of getting caught. It was so odd to see him like this, the way he looked before he had changed but so different at the same time.

And knowing him so much better than him knowing her. Assuming the Doctor didn't get back right away, if she got to know him now, how on Earth would she manage not to let anything slip about his future? After all, she hadn't even been able to hide that they'd met, had even blurted out that they'd met the night Henrik's had blown up.

Maybe her mum wasn't as much a risk of giving out too much information as she was.

A tiny voice whispered inside her head that it was more than that, that it was more than the fact that he looked like the first him she'd known. She knew his brown haired, brown eyed, pinstriped self was the same man, she knew it down into her bones, but part of her had missed this him, big ears, blue eyes, Northern accent and all. She had told herself that things had changed between her and the Doctor after they had met Sarah Jane, and particularly after Reinette, but really it had begun before that. Things had been a little off between them ever since his regeneration. It was like they had had to learn how to be around each other all over again, and she missed the easy relationship they'd had before he'd regenerated.

She felt guilty feeling that way, even a little tiny bit, and she shoved the thought away from herself.

Finally about an hour later the front door jingled and Abhirati burst back in.

"Rose, I'm so sorry it took so long for me to get back!" she apologized. "How did everything go while I was gone?"

"Fine," she answered.

"Then why don't you go for the day," the older woman said. "After all, you didn't even get a lunch."

Rose glanced at the door leading to the garage. She'd hoped to see the Doctor—no, _John_, she reminded herself again—again that day.

"But…" she protested. "Don't you still need me? I can stay as long as you want."

"No, that's fine," Abhirati replied. "You've already been a huge help today. Anything not done today can wait until tomorrow."

Rose wanted to protest again but knew it would look suspicious. Instead, she thanked her new boss and left.

"Now what?" she said once she was outside. It would be hours before the Doctor—_John_, she reminded herself irritably for the third time—got off work. Maybe she could hang out somewhere for a while and _accidentally_ run into him after she got off work.

She looked up and down the street. There were a number of fast food restaurants and cafés with a clear view of the garage, and some of them wouldn't blink at her staying there for hours during the afternoon. Particularly the Chinese place directly across from it.

Perfect.

Rose headed across the street but stopped before she entered the restaurant. She reached for her wallet—and groaned. She didn't have it. No wallet, no money. She had only occasionally needed money since she had begun traveling with the Doctor, and what little she had left from her last job was in her room in the TARDIS. She had been traveling in the TARDIS so long she had forgotten to bring it.

Disappointed, she headed back to her mum's flat.

Her mother was in the lounge in her typical afternoon spot, on the sofa in front of the television. Some sort of talk show was on telly, and she was on the phone. Rose unsuccessfully tried to slip unnoticed into the kitchen to get something to eat. She winced when her mother waved at her to stop.

"I'll have to ring you back, Bev. Rose is here," Jackie said. She rang off and put the phone on the table before getting up to give her daughter a hug. "Hello, sweetheart. I was sure you'd all be off by now." She looked over Rose's shoulder. "So where's himself, then?"

"Back at the TARDIS."

Jackie's eyes narrowed. "Alright, what's goin' on between you two?"

"What do you mean?"

"I hardly ever see one of you without the other. The two of you are usually like Siamese twins, you are. But now you've been here two days and he hasn't been here at all. So what's up?"

"Can't I just want to spend some time alone with my mum?"

Jackie crossed her arms and raised an eyebrow. "As much as I'd love to believe that was true, I don't buy it for a minute. So where is he?"

"In the TARDIS."

"And where's the TARDIS?"

Rose hesitated a moment. "It's complicated." With a sigh of inevitability, she gestured at the sofa. "You'd better sit down. This might take a while."

~oOo~

An hour and a fresh pot of tea later, Jackie was still puzzled.

It had taken a while for Rose to explain to her the intricacies of time travel: how the same person could accidentally be in the same place and time twice over. She had had that conversation with her mum before, in regards to being at her father's death both as a baby and as an adult, but the implications evidently hadn't sunk in because her mother was still confused.

"So the bloke that was here fixin' my faucet was really the Doctor?" Jackie asked.

"Yes, Mum," Rose replied.

"Before he regenerated? Even though he regenerated six months ago?"

"Yes, Mum," Rose said again. "Before I even began traveling with him in fact."

"And he thinks he's human?"

"No. He is human. Really, properly human."

"Because of that cammy thing."

"Chameleon arch," Rose corrected. "It turned him human."

"And he thinks his name's John Smith?"

"Yeah."

"And he's workin' as a mechanic down at Mickey's old job?"

"Yep."

"And he doesn't remember anythin' about bein' the Doctor or bein' an alien or that blue box of his?"

"The TARDIS," Rose said. "Not 'that blue box', and he doesn't appear to."

Jackie shook her head slowly. "And he's the same person who fixed my faucet?" She had a strange expression on her face, one that looked to be a combination of distaste, embarrassment, and dread.

"Yeah, Mum. Why?"

"No reason," she replied quickly. "No reason 't all."

Rose rolled her eyes. That had been the third time her mum had asked about the Doctor—no, _John_—fixing her faucet, and each time she had looked more and more uncomfortable. "Alright, what happened?"

"Nothing."

Rose gave her a look.

"Nothing," Jackie insisted. "Honest!"

Rose sighed. Her mother had always been a terrible liar. If she said nothing happened, that meant something had definitely happened, something she didn't want to admit to, and Rose was fairly certain she didn't want to know what it was.

"The important thing is that if you see him, you don't say anything to him about any of this," Rose warned. "As the Doctor, he hasn't even met you yet."

"I know, I know," her mum replied.

"In fact, it might be best if you just avoid him entirely," Rose said.

Jackie's eyes lit up. "Yes!" she said quickly. "Yes, that's exactly what I'll do! I'll avoid him. 'S not like I'd want to go out of my way to spend time with him anyway, the bloody wanker." She nodded decisively. "I'll just avoid him."

After giving her mother another sharp look, Rose shook her head, trying not to think about what had happened between John and her mum. She really, really did not want to know.

"So if you're here watchin' over this him while the other one is off with Mickey figurin' out what happened, how long are you gonna be here?"

"I don't know," Rose answered. "It could take a while."

"Well, as much as I love havin' you here, sweetheart, I can't be supportin' you," Jackie told her. "If you're here more than a week or so, you're gonna have to get a job. Henrik's is hirin'."

"Henrik's rebuilt?" Rose asked in astonishment. "When did that happen?"

"They've been workin' on it a while now. In fact, their grand re-opening is in a couple of weeks. Of course, you'd know that if you were around more," Jackie said pointedly. "Anyway, since you used to work there, you could probably get your old job back. It's the least they could do considering you could have been killed when it blew up."

Rose didn't answer for a moment as she was still trying to wrap her head around the fact that Henrik's had rebuilt and she hadn't known about it.

"Rose. Rose!"

"No," she finally replied after she realized her mother was trying to get her attention. "I've already got a job. I'm working at the garage. I started this morning."

Jackie looked both surprised and pleased.

"Good," she said decisively. "That store was givin' you airs and graces anyway. If you'd just taken the job at the butcher's in the first place you'd probably never have run off with him."

Rose didn't bother to answer as her mother was right, but not for the reason she thought. If she hadn't worked at Henrik's, she'd never have met the Doctor. And instead of traveling through time and space with him, she'd have been stuck here on the Estate, possibly for the rest of her life.

And then she remembered Sarah Jane, who had waited almost her entire life for him to return. It could still happen. She could still be stuck here, living out the rest of her life on the Estate, her days filled with jobs and telly and beans on toast.

Inwardly she shuddered.

~oOo~

John set the remnants of his tea on the table and sat down at the computer. The little black cat, who was definitely not moving in, immediately jumped up into his lap.

When he had finished the repairs on the Infiniti, John had brought the paperwork on the car into the office only to find that Rose had left for the day. He'd had to work hard to hide his disappointment. He'd hoped to be able to talk to her again. He refused to consider that part of the reason he was so disappointed had nothing to do with the fact she might hold a key to his past.

But even in the short conversation he'd had with her, he'd gotten more information from her about his past than he'd been able to learn in the past six months. She'd told him a specific time and place he'd been in the time he couldn't remember. Outside Henrik's Department Store the night it had blown up.

He studied the article on the monitor in front of him. Henrik's had exploded early in 2005. Several terrorist groups had rushed to take credit, but the final conclusion was that the explosion had been as a result of a gas leak. There appeared to be only one fatality, an electrician named Wilson, something that was being heralded as a miracle since only a short while earlier the store had been filled with both shoppers and staff. Neither he nor Rose had been mentioned.

One interesting fact he had learned was that Rose had been wrong about one thing. Henrik's had been rebuilt. A simple search revealed that in fact their grand opening was in only a few weeks. For a moment he wondered why she didn't know, since it appeared to be big news locally.

He spent the next hour reading as many newspaper articles and official reports as he could on the night of the explosion, but they gave him no more information than he already had. He had, however, learned one thing, one very important, thing he hadn't known before. One crucial piece of the puzzle that was his past.

He had been in London in 2005. Almost two full years before he had woken up in the alley on New Year's.

It was a new place to concentrate his search for clues to his past. If he had been here, and according to Rose he had, there must be some evidence. Somewhere.

But before he began to search for himself again, he had something, or _someone_, else to research. His fingers flew across the keyboard, searching for a current resident of Peckham named Rose Tyler.

There were three: a twelve year old schoolgirl, a thirty-six year old married mother of three, and a sixty-nine year old Roman Catholic nun. Damn. This was clearly not going to be as easy as he had expected it would.

"Rose Tyler, who are you?" he said aloud, waking the cat enough that she began to purr. He absently petted her before returning to the computer.

To his surprise, there were thousands of Rose Tylers in the UK, twice as many if you counted variations of the name like Rosalyn or Rosemary. He immediately refined the search to exclude those as well as the ones from Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.

Down to 1145.

She looked to be about twenty, give or take a year, so he excluded all who were eighteen and younger or over twenty-five.

Down to 452.

Her accent was London, so he narrowed the search to the Greater London area.

135.

South London.

27.

A manageable number, but how to narrow it further? What else did he know about her? His brow furrowed in concentration.

South London accent, about twenty…

He suddenly remembered she had said she had worked at Henrik's.

"Yes!" he said, waking the cat again. After giving him a nip, she jumped down and stalked off. He hardly noticed as he began to hack into the employment records of the store.

"There you are. Rose Marion Tyler," he said slowly, listening to the way it sounded as it rolled off his tongue. "Based on this, currently twenty years old, 48 Bucknall House, Peckham." He glanced over at the window. "Huh, that's just across the courtyard. Employee ID number…"

There was scarcely any more information than that in Henrik's records, basically just her dates of employment and sorely inadequate pay, so he moved on to a Google search of her full name.

There were only two Rose Marion Tylers in the country. One was a sixty year old woman—in Manchester of all places, he thought in amusement given his nickname—whose son Sam had been a DCI in the Greater Manchester Police until an auto accident had put him in a coma the previous year.

The other was the one he was looking for.

Rose Marion Tyler. Daughter of Jacqueline Tyler, resident of Peckham, and Peter Tyler, deceased. Attended Jericho Street Junior School. Won the bronze in a gymnastics competition for under-7s. Left school aged sixteen with adequate scores on her GCSEs. More than adequate, actually, and he wondered why she hadn't sat for A-levels. Worked various jobs until she was hired by Henrik's Department Store, where she worked as a shop assistant.

Disappeared the day after Henrik's blew up.

John stared at the screen. "Well, she's certainly not missing now," he said aloud.

Another search revealed a series of stories on her disappearance in the local paper.

_Local Girl Missing After Explosion_

_Shop Assistant Goes Missing Day After Explosion_

_Mother Distraught Over Missing Daughter_

_Local Man Questioned Over Disappearance of Girlfriend_

He skimmed the articles. They were filled with speculation as to what may have happened to her, but they contained few actual facts, only a brief biography and the date of her disappearance.

Finally he found a single, very short article dated approximately a year later.

_Missing Girl Turns Up With Older Man—Says She Was "Traveling"_

_After being missing a year, local girl Rose Tyler finally turned up at her mother's home in Peckham in the company of a man believed to be in his late thirties or early forties. The police have refused to comment officially, although unnamed sources in the department have said that the man stated he had hired Tyler as a companion. Although the two denied a sexual relationship, the police are reportedly skeptical of the claim. The case is now considered closed._

John chuckled. "Now that's a story I'd like to hear," he said.


	10. Chapter 9

**Chapter Nine**

Heart pounding, John automatically reached for his sketchbook and pencils in an attempt to try to capture the dream images before they faded.

Fire, searing fire. Flames burning the trees, the fields, even the air itself. More disjointed faces and bizarre pepperpot creatures. A blue box floating in a sky of planets and stars. A cavernous chamber with metal grating on the floor and odd columns that branched treelike as they stretched to the ceiling.

And the blonde girl.

No, not the blonde girl. _Rose_. Rose Tyler.

His pencil flew across the pad as he sketched Rose. Standing on the embankment of the Thames. Running hand in hand with him. Swinging on a chain over an enormous pit.

Clearly many of the dream images were simply products of his subconscious. Knowing that he had been present at the explosion of Henrik's however could explain his recurring dreams of fire. Maybe some of the other images were memories trying to come to the surface, particularly the ones of Rose.

_A hand in his. Run._

Or perhaps the dreams of Rose were just products of fantasy, of wishful thinking, he thought, as he looked as his sketch of Rose in his arms after he had caught her midair.

He pushed the thought out his mind. Thoughts of holding Rose were completely inappropriate given their obvious and fairly substantial age difference.

Not to mention they were pointless.

When they'd met and she'd begun teasing him, he was instantly smitten, but even if they'd been the same age, there was no way she'd ever be attracted to him. Not with his daft face. Allowing himself to develop a crush on her was a bad idea. Nothing could come of it, and it would be nothing but trouble since he was working with her.

He pulled a face. Work. Damn, he had to get ready for work. He didn't want to be late again. He didn't mind his job, he really didn't—after all it beat sitting around his flat all day with nothing to do—but working, actually having a job that he went to, always seemed to him like a foreign, even alien, concept.

But today he'd see Rose again. And that was fantastic.

And as he headed to the shower a slow grin spread across his face.

~oOo~

Rose was jerked awake by the harsh sound of the alarm clock. Gritting her teeth, she slammed her hand down on it.

Blessed silence. She sighed in relief.

After a moment she propped herself up onto her elbows and looked at the clock. Half seven. Barely enough time to get ready and get to work by eight.

"Time to get up, sweetheart," her mother called from the hall. "You've got a job to get to, and believe me, I never thought I'd say that again."

Rose rolled her eyes.

"And you'd better get in and out of the bathroom quick, because Stuart's gotta get in there too," Jackie added.

Rose dropped her head back on the pillow and groaned.

~oOo~

Twenty minutes later, she flew down the stairs leading to the courtyard. Despite hurrying through shower, hair, and makeup, she was running late. Not good for only her second day at work. She needed to reset her alarm clock for seven.

She just wasn't used to having to get ready at a certain time anymore. The Doctor would tease her about taking forever to get ready in the morning—or what served as morning on the TARDIS—but truly, they were never late places because of her.

She had gotten spoiled.

She burst out the door to the courtyard—and stopped. _He_ was coming out of the building across the way.

Perfect. She grinned.

He headed towards the alley, and she called out to him. "Doc—" She stopped herself and winced. Dammit. She had to watch that.

"John," she yelled.

He stopped and turned towards the sound of her voice. She jogged to catch up with him, and they automatically fell into step.

"Running late again?" she asked.

"Evidently I'm not the only one," he said, sounding amused.

She ignored that. "I figure that as long as we're headed to the same place, we could walk together," she said.

"Works for me."

~oOo~

Over the next several days John fell into the habit of walking to and from work with Rose, ostensibly because they lived in the same area, but actually just because John enjoyed her company. He watched for her, and if she was running late he waited just inside the entrance to his building until he could see her coming down the stairs of Bucknall House. That way he could _accidentally_ run into her in the courtyard. In the afternoon since he usually got done earlier than she did, he'd waste time slowly cleaning up the garage until she got off, and then like a schoolboy who fancied a girl, he'd walk her home. It meant he'd have to run out again to pick up something for tea, but it was worth it.

And the only time one of the other mechanics had begun to make a crude comment on their arrival together, a single look from John had stopped him mid-sentence. After that, no one had dared to say anything.

That Saturday, John left his flat a few minutes early in order to take a side trip to the floor below his before meeting Rose. A row between Rita and Chuck had woken him up again in the middle of the night. Since it had ended quickly, he hadn't bothered getting up to stop it. Although all was quiet now, he just wanted to make sure Rita was okay.

He lightly rapped on the door to their flat and waited a minute. He thought about knocking again but then decided against it, not wanting to disturb her if she was asleep. Just as he was turning to leave, the door opened a crack. Through the narrow opening he could see the chain lock fastened and a single eye peering at him.

"Rita, are you alright?" he asked quietly.

She shushed him and nodded.

"Did he hurt you?"

"No," she whispered. "I'm fine. But Chuck's asleep and I don't want him to wake up."

Rita started to close the door, and John stopped her. He searched her face, what he could see of it, and frowned. "You sure you're alright?"

"Yes," she hissed. "Now go on, before he wakes up."

"I'm comin' back here after work to check on you," he told her.

"Fine," she said with a huff and shut the door in his face.

Still frowning, he headed down to the courtyard to meet Rose.

~oOo~

For the first time in weeks, the afternoon was slow. With nothing to do, the other mechanics had gone home at lunchtime. Even the boss and his wife had taken a rare afternoon off, leaving Rose to work the desk and John to finish up the repairs on the last few cars.

John snuck a look over the engine he was working on into the garage's office. Rose was sitting at the desk doing some sort of paperwork. Even he could see from where he was that she was bored to tears.

She didn't belong here, he thought. She was too bright, too curious about the world around her to be spending her days filing and answering the telephone. Of course everyone had to make a living of some sort, that was the reason he worked here as well, but she seemed destined for greater things than working in the office of a mechanic's shop.

He watched her for a minute. She looked a little different today. Her shoulder length blonde hair was sort of wavy, and she was wearing a bright pink top that suited her coloring.

She sure was pretty.

No. He shouldn't be thinking about her that way. He was far too old for her, he told himself firmly, and returned his attention to the engine in front of him.

After he finished the car, John grabbed a spare rag to wipe his grimy hands and then tossed the cloth into a nearby barrel. He crossed to the office and stuck his head in the door.

"Finished the Ford," he said. "Just had a few loose wires and needed a new battery. Movin' on to the Vauxhall next. That'll take some time. Don't know what's wrong with that one."

"You mean you can't tell by smellin' it?" Rose asked teasingly. She gave him her wide, cheeky grin, the one with the tip of her tongue touching just the edge of her upper teeth. She often grinned at him that way, and every time she did he wanted to snog that look off her face.

Down, boy. She probably flirted with everyone like that. Although he'd never noticed her doing that. And he noticed everything about her.

"No, I can't tell by smellin' it," he answered in the same tone as she had used. "Not unless there's somethin' wrong with the fuel injection system. So the Vauxhall's problems have to be somewhere else."

"Bill and Pat both have looked at it already, and neither of them could find what was wrong," she told him.

"Bill and Pat aren't me."

She snorted. "You think you're so impressive."

"I am so impressive!" he said with false indignation.

"Then let's see how fast you can fix the next one, Mr. Impressive." She winked at him.

She _winked_ at him. His heart sped up, and unexpectedly, something stirred a bit lower. He forced himself to ignore the reaction.

"Alright," he said with a nod. "Time me."

She pulled out her mobile and made a few adjustments. "Ready, steady… go!"

Flashing her a manic grin, he rushed to the car and opened the bonnet, determined to show her just impressive he was in this. Then he could show her how impressive he was in other things.

No, he couldn't be thinking that way. Down, boy.

For the next hour or so—he felt like he should be able to instantly know how much time had passed to the second but wasn't sure why—he concentrated on the car in front of him. It was an older vehicle, not computerized, therefore whatever was wrong with it should be fairly straightforward. But the problem eluded him for some reason. Everything looked fine. It just wouldn't start. Wouldn't fire up, no matter what he did. He checked the fuel line, the battery, the fuses… everything he could think of. Well, whatever it is wasn't a simple problem.

As he began to check everything again, starting with the fuel injection system, he barely noticed a young man pull up, get out of his car, and go into the office.

After a couple of minutes, he began to hear raised voices coming from the room.

"Get outa here, Jimmy! I'm warnin' you!"

"I got every right to be 'ere. My car needs to be fixed. What would your boss say if he knew you were turnin' down business?"

"There's lots a places you can get your car fixed! Find one of them!"

Rose was yelling, but there was a tiny note of something that sounded like fear in it. John immediately dropped his wrench, not noticing or caring where it landed, and quickly strode to the office.

He stopped at the doorway and took in the scene in front of him in an instant. The younger man had his back to him and had Rose cornered in the far side of the office, blocking her way both through exit out the front door and the one into the garage.

And Rose, his fearless Rose, looked afraid. And the look on her face wiped out any realization that in his thoughts he had called her his.

"But this is the best place to get the work done," Jimmy was saying, looking her up and down. "In fact, this looks like the best place to get a lot of things… done."

"Oi! Leave her alone."

At the sound of John's voice, the younger man whirled around. Wearing jeans and a t-shirt advertising a rock band John had never heard of, Jimmy appeared to be a few years older than Rose, mid-twenties maybe, with shaggy, dark blonde hair and green eyes. He had a bit of scruff, like he hadn't shaved in a couple of days, and he reeked of cigarettes and cheap whiskey. Very cheap whiskey.

"This doesn't concern you, old man," Jimmy told him. "So fuck off."

"The lady told you to leave," John said evenly. "So it's time to leave."

Jimmy made a rude noise. "She ain't no lady. And who are you, her grandfather? Or are you her mum's latest shack-up?"

"I'm the one who's gonna kick your arse if you don't leave her alone," John said coldly.

"John, s'alright, I can handle him," Rose said.

Jimmy's mouth twisted into a nasty grin. "Yeah, I remember how well you _handled_ me," he said, his voice thick with innuendo.

"Jimmy, shut up and jus' go," Rose said. She pushed at his shoulder in emphasis.

"Don't push me, bitch," he yelled and shoved her back, hard. She slammed into the wall behind her.

And then he was on the floor, clutching his abdomen and moaning in pain with John standing over him, his foot on the back of his neck.

"If you ever touch her again," John said coldly, "if you ever see her again, if she ever sees you again, hell, if_ I_ ever see you again, you will not live to regret it. Understand?"

Still on the floor, Jimmy nodded.

"So now," John continued, in an almost cheerful tone, "get yourself up, dust yourself off, and crawl back into whatever hellhole you climbed out of in the first place." He started removing his foot, and then replaced it. "Better yet, perhaps you should consider emigration. Maybe to Afghanistan. Lovely there this time of year."

Now he really did remove his foot, and Jimmy immediately scooted out the front entrance. He watched as the younger man limped over to his car and drove off.

"Good riddance to bad rubbish," he said, turning back to Rose. She was staring at him, her jaw slack.

"I didn't know you could do that," she said, her voice colored with shock—and could it possibly be admiration?

"No reason you should," he told her.

"What was that?" she asked, gesturing with her hand in the general direction of where Jimmy had been.

"A martial art that's an offshoot of Aikido," he answered without thinking. Then he frowned. How did he know that? And what's more, how did he know how to do that? It wasn't the first time he had uncovered unknown advanced skills, like his abilities on the computer or his affinity for languages, but whenever it happened it still surprised and puzzled him.

"Well, whatever it was," she said, "that was pretty—" She bit off the last word, so he supplied it.

"Impressive?" He gave her a smug grin.

She laughed. "Impressive," she agreed. She bit her upper lip for a moment before continuing. "Thank you."

"You're welcome." His grin turned into a genuine smile.

They stood there grinning at one another for several long moments, not saying anything.

"You know, I could've handled him myself," she said eventually.

"Oh, I've no doubt," he told her. "Just wanted to save you the bother. Didn't want you to ruin your manicure." The clock on the wall caught his eye, and he frowned again. Again he was struck with the idea he should have already known what time it was, should always know to the millisecond exactly what time it was.

But that was ridiculous.

"Y'know," he said slowly, tearing his eyes away from the clock, "I think it's late enough that we could probably just close up for the day."

"Sounds good to me," she agreed.

"And then maybe we could go out…" She blinked at him, she literally did, obviously surprised by his suggestion, and he didn't know how he felt about that. Would she be that shocked by him asking her out? "And you could tell me exactly who that was and why he was harassing you."

Her face fell slightly; he could see the exact instant she realized he wasn't suggesting an actual date. Did that mean she had wanted him to ask her out?

She couldn't.

Could she?

Nah. Must be just his imagination. _Or more wishful thinking _said a small voice inside his head. A voice that was gonna get him into trouble, he told himself.

She had quickly substituted the look of disappointment for a bright smile. "Closing early sounds great," she said. "Goin' out too. Anything to get away from this mess." She gestured at all the papers she had been working on earlier. "Besides, I figure I owe you. For savin' my manicure 'n all. I'll even pay." Then she frowned. "I forgot. I won't have any money until I get paid next week."

"'S alright," he said. "I'll pay."

"You'll pay?" She was staring at him again, a look of shock on her face, and he wondered why.

"I'll pay," he told her. "You can pay next time."

She gave him a wide grin, and he realized he had just suggested they go out more than once.

"Fantastic!" she said.


	11. Chapter 10

**Chapter Ten**

As he adjusted his dark grey silk tie, Mickey examined himself in the full length mirror in the corner of the wardrobe.

He had never been one for suits. He did own one, which he usually only wore to weddings, but the last time he had worn it had been to his grandmother's funeral several years earlier. Afterwards he had shoved it in the back of his cupboard, intending never to wear it again.

But this suit was as different from that one as a Rolls Royce was from a Mini Cooper. He had found it hanging in the front of the wardrobe with a spotlight shining on it. It was made of fine grey wool lined with satin, the cut of the jacket and trousers were in a timeless style, the cotton shirt was crisp and pure white, and the tie was neither too narrow nor too wide.

And the Doctor had told him that although jeans and t-shirts were becoming common in the era, in order to be close to the route the presidential motorcade would take they needed to be dressed conservatively enough that they wouldn't stand out in the crowd lining the streets, and Mickey needed to change.

He had slipped the clothes on and discovered that not only was everything his size, it all fit him like a glove. After admiring himself in the mirror once more, he placed a felt fedora on his head and adjusted it to a jaunty angle.

Mickey grinned. "I should definitely wear a suit more often, because I look good," he said aloud.

Several minutes later, minus the hat, Mickey returned to the console room to find the Doctor standing at the console, staring into the monitor and frowning.

"Is this alright?" he asked.

The Doctor barely spared him a glance. "It's fine."

"Because there was a hat there too. I can go back and get it…"

The Doctor didn't answer. Instead he began to flip a switch back and forth over and over again so hard he looked like he was going to break it.

"What's wrong?" Mickey asked.

"The TARDIS doesn't want to land," he answered. "I'm going to have to force her to. Hang on!"

The mere fact that the Doctor was warning him of a rough landing, when he had never given him a warning before, made Mickey grab onto the nearest coral strut and hang on for dear life. The Doctor rushed around the console, flipping switches, pressing buttons and spinning dials. Finally he yanked on a large lever. The TARDIS evidently wasn't responding the way the Doctor wanted it to, because he grabbed a mallet hanging off the edge of the console and began hitting the controls.

With that, the TARDIS console room rocked violently back and forth and began to echo with the sounds of materialization. Despite hanging on, Mickey was thrown to the floor.

"Ow," he complained. Wincing, he stood and rubbed his bum.

The Doctor ignored the complaint as he stared into the monitor again. "I'm already here," he said.

"Well, that's why we came, yeah? Because he's here?"

"Yes, but I was hoping to arrive before he did. If we had arrived first, we'd have been able to track him from the moment he left his TARDIS."

Mickey yanked on his collar in a futile attempt to make it more comfortable. Although the suit fit perfectly, he'd never get used to wearing a tie. "Didn't you say you could sense him?" he asked. "In your head or somethin'?"

"If I can sense him, he can sense me, and that's the last thing we want." The Doctor let out a huff of irritation. "Now we'll have to do this the hard way. We'll just have to look for him." He picked up his long brown overcoat and pulled it on. Mickey frowned.

"Aren't you gonna change?" he asked.

"Why bother? Pinstriped suit? It's a classic," the Doctor informed him. "Wearing this I fit in anywhere. Well, almost anywhere. I did have to change into a toga while we were in ancient Rome. And then there's this little planet named Xerbet in the galaxy Andromeda where all forms of clothing are absolutely forbidden. Against the law, in fact. See, the Xerbetians value honesty above all other virtues, and they see clothing as a form of deception. They consider the hiding of one's body to be the hiding of one's true self. Quite liberating, actually, albeit a bit chilly."

"You didn't take Rose there, did you?" Mickey asked.

The Doctor didn't answer, but a smirk spread across his face. He headed towards the TARDIS exit and Mickey quickly followed.

"Seriously, you didn't take Rose there? You're just windin' me up again, yeah?"

Ignoring the question, the Doctor flung open the doors of the TARDIS. "Mickey Smith, welcome to Dallas, Texas, 22 November, 1963."

The TARDIS had landed in a narrow alley between two tall brick buildings. Thankfully, it was deserted. Because of his own experiences having seen it appear and disappear and even plummet from the sky, Mickey didn't know how strangers would react to what looked like a British police box suddenly appearing, seemingly out of nowhere, on a city street in America, but he assumed it wouldn't be good.

"Looks a bit boring," he answered, looking up at the metal fire escapes that clung to the walls of the building. "Could be any alley anywhere. You sure we're in Dallas?"

The Doctor gave him a look before heading out of the alley.

Mickey followed him out to the street and his jaw dropped. He stared around himself in amazement. The storefronts looked like many of the older stores on the Estate, with old fashioned cafés replacing modern takeaways, but the street...

The street was filled with Packards and Plymouths, Buicks and Chevys, some of which he had only seen in photographs before. All were ancient vehicles to him, but they weren't ancient here. They were new, brand new in some cases.

And the people also seemed to come from another era. Which they did, he reminded himself. The women all wore dresses that fell below the knee, and the men all either wore suits or trousers paired with collared shirts or jumpers. Mickey suddenly understood why the Doctor had insisted he change out of his t-shirt and jeans. He would have stuck out like a sore thumb.

"Unreal," he said. "Looks like a movie set. But it's real. It's really, actually real. We're really in the past." He grinned. "Now that's what I'm talkin' about! And Dallas, 1963! History in the makin'!" he said excitedly. A couple of passersby stared at him, and he lowered his voice. "The grassy knoll, the second gunman…"

"Ah, so you're a conspiracy buff?" the Doctor asked.

"A little," he answered. "So, what was it? Did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone or was there a second gunman? Was he hired by the KGB or in league with the Mafia? Did the CIA order the hit?"

The Doctor chucked. "I don't know," he admitted. "I try to stay away from fixed points. Too easy to muck things up."

Mickey shook his head in disbelief. "Wow, we're really here. We're actually here." When he saw the Doctor smirking at him again, his smile disappeared. "This doesn't change anything."

"Oh, no, of course not."

"I'm still angry, yeah?"

"Of course."

"I mean, just because we ended up where we meant to go this time doesn't mean you aren't still a bloody wanker."

Again the Doctor shot him a look. "Well, there we are then."

"Right. Just so long as we're clear about that." Mickey looked around. "So which way do we go?"

The Doctor pointed directly in front of them. "About three blocks that way is Dealey Plaza and the Texas Schoolbook Depository. If I'm here, that's where we'll find me."

"How do you know?"

"Because that's where I'd go," the Doctor said simply. He took two steps forward and then stopped short. "Almost forgot," he said. He rummaged deep in one of the pockets of his trousers. After a moment he pulled out what looked like two tiny hearing aids which he pushed into his ears.

"Telepathic dampers," he said, answering Mickey's unasked question. "Don't want him to sense that we're here. Of course the downside is that I won't be able to sense him either. We'll just have to look for him."

"If you had those, why didn't you wear them before, when we were lookin' for him on the Estate?"

"Didn't have them before. I made them while you were getting changed. It's not as if I didn't have enough time. You took longer to get ready than Rose does."

"Oi, I'm not the one who gave me the wrong directions to the Wardrobe Room! I got lost three times on the way there."

The Doctor ignored the accusation. Instead he began to lecture as they headed in the direction of the Plaza. "The '60s were an age of enormous turmoil and massive contradictions in America. The Cold War, race riots, the Vietnam War, the space race… Just a few months ago, Martin Luther King gave his iconic 'I have a Dream' speech, spurring on the peace movement." He came to a stop and paused for a moment. "And in an hour's time, an assassin's bullet will end the life of President Kennedy, leaving behind a widow, two small children, and a nation in mourning."

They were both silent for a moment before they continued on down the street. They passed a variety of shops: a butcher's, a bakery, a tobacconist, a bookstore. All were common to Mickey's home and era, but somehow they looked different in a way he couldn't put his finger on. Ahead he heard the strains of music. Next to him the Doctor grinned.

"Ah, a record store. And playing the King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley! I bet Rose would love to meet him! Maybe after this is all over…"

As they walked down Main Street, they joined the crowd that already begun to form. There were people from all walks of life lining the street. Young and old, rich and poor, all races and creeds, all were gathering to catch a glimpse of the presidential motorcade.

Despite himself, Mickey caught the excitement of the festive atmosphere. Red, white, and blue banners fluttered overhead, suspended on wires that crisscrossed the road. Children darted back and forth, weaving in and out of the crowd while their parents scolded them. Older men congregated in groups smoking cigarettes and cigars, while older women stood apart and gossiped. Police officers wandered up and down the street, while photographers snapped photos of the crowd.

Mickey stopped and looked around, taking in the surroundings. He'd never been to America, never been back in time, and he wanted to memorize all of it if this was going to be his last trip with the Doctor.

Beside him he heard someone giggle. He turned to see a group of girls looking at him. One, a pretty young woman in a yellow dress and white cardigan, smiled shyly at him and he smiled back.

"Come on, Mickey," the Doctor snapped. "You can flirt later. We've got a job to do. We've got to find me before I get myself into trouble." He strode down the street, his coat flapping behind him. Mickey had to jog to catch up.

"Why don't you use your sonic screwdriver to track down your TARDIS like you did last time?" he asked breathlessly.

"Because I don't want to find the TARDIS, I want to find me." The Doctor stopped short and scanned the crowd on the other side of the street. "The photo of me here, do you know from what vantage point it was taken?"

Mickey shook his head. "I didn't see it. Rose did."

"Hmm. If you were me, Mickey, where would you stand?"

"I dunno. I guess as close to the street as I could."

"But that's assuming that the reason I came was to see the motorcade. If I just wanted to see President Kennedy, I'd have gone to his inauguration. No, there's something else going on here." He closed his eyes. After several long moments his brow furrowed. "I don't understand," he muttered. "This is a fixed point."

The Doctor opened his eyes and jerked his head towards a building. Mickey nodded and they left the crowd.

"What's goin' on?" Mickey asked.

"I told you about fixed points," the Doctor said quietly. "The Kennedy assassination is a fixed point. It has to happen. But something's wrong. Something here is in flux. Something could change. And I don't know what it is." He looked around. "Just our being here, our very presence here could change something. And since I'm here twice… We have to find me. And fast. Before I change history."

If Mickey had thought Main Street had been crowded, that was nothing compared to Dealey Plaza. It was wall to wall people on either side of the road. The Doctor led the way as they fought their way through the crowd, searching for the younger Doctor.

"I don't see him. You. Whatever."

"Neither do I," the Doctor said. "And it's almost time. The motorcade will be here within minutes."

"Which one's the Depository?"

The Doctor pointed to a tall building about a block back the way they came before returning to scanning the crowd.

"He's there right now, isn't he?" Mickey meant Oswald, rather than the younger Doctor, but the Doctor understood what he meant.

"He works there. By now he's been in the building for hours, biding his time, waiting for everyone to leave so he could set up his rifle." He huffed in frustration. "There's too many people. We need to be higher up."

"How 'bout over there?"

They fought their way across the street to a sloping grassy area that was high enough to see most of the crowd. The Doctor pulled a pair of opera glasses out of his pocket.

"Much better."

"Got another pair of those?"

"Yep."

With the aid of a second pair of opera glasses, Mickey scanned the crowd. "I don't see… Got 'im. There he is. Behind that fat guy over there." The younger Doctor was at street level near the Depository, waving something back and forth. "Looks like he's looking for something with his sonic screwdriver."

"What?"

The Doctor turned and looked where Mickey had indicated. "What? What am I…"

In the distance, the crowd began to cheer, and Mickey turned back to looking at the street. "Doctor! Doctor! I think the President's here!"

As a plain, white Ford, the beginning of the motorcade, turned the corner onto Elm Street, Mickey's heart began to pound. The excitement that he had felt earlier had disappeared, and now he felt sick. This was history for him, he knew what was going to happen, but somehow knowing and doing nothing made it worse.

The next few moments seemed to be in slow motion. As he watched, the white car pulled ahead while a midnight blue convertible, President Kennedy's car, moved at a crawl around the corner, followed by police escort. Just as Mickey spotted the President and First Lady in the back of the car, he heard the sound of a car backfiring. The President slumped forward. As the First Lady tried to aid her husband, several people in the crowd began screaming.

Eyes wide with shock, Mickey gasped for air, sickened by the realization that what he had heard was the shot of a sniper's rifle rather than a backfire, and that he had just witnessed President Kennedy's assassination.

He had just seen someone murdered. He fought down the urge to vomit.

But it wasn't over. As confusion reigned, Mickey turned back to look at the younger, leather wearing Doctor. Another shot rang out, and then possibly a third. At the same time, he saw the Doctor lunge to the side, knocking a young woman to the ground.

As time returned to normal, police began to head in the direction of the hill.

"Doctor!"

The Doctor stood next to him, still staring through the opera glasses, seemingly frozen in shock. Mickey shook his shoulder.

"Doctor! We've got to go! Now!" He yanked on his arm. "Run!"

They ran in the opposite direction of the crowd, making a large loop around the Plaza before heading back the way they came. When they reached the TARDIS, the Doctor fumbled with his key before letting them inside.

"I really need to make an electronic key for the TARDIS," the Doctor said.

Beside him, Mickey wheezed for air. "I really, _really_ need to work out more."

The Doctor circled the console, setting the controls. The Time Rotor began to move up and down and the sound of dematerialization echoed through the room.

"Where are we goin'? Aren't we gonna go back and try to find him again?"

"No need," the Doctor answered. "Whatever injured both the TARDIS and me didn't happen here."

"What did happen?"

"He saved someone's life. Someone, a young woman who originally died from the ricochet of a bullet fragment, didn't die now."

"Didn't you say that this was a fixed point?"

"The Kennedy assassination was a fixed point," the Doctor told him. "Her death wasn't."

"So you saved someone's life."

"It appears so."

"Is that why you went there, to save her life?"

"I honestly don't know. I still don't remember any of this, and that worries me. Really, really worries me." At Mickey's questioning look, the Doctor continued. "If I was involved with this situation, if I had somehow met him, to maintain the timelines my younger self would have had to forget this happened until it happened to me, this me. If that had happened, if my involvement here had caused him to force himself to forget this had happened, then the memories of today should be returning to me now. And they're not. Which means that my memory loss has been caused by something else, something that affected both me and the TARDIS."

"Which means we're back to square one."

"Which means we're back to square one," the Doctor agreed.

"So now what?"

"Now we go on to the next place I know I was, and we look for something that could have affected both me and the TARDIS."

The Doctor moved around the console, setting the next coordinates.

"How do you do it?" Mickey said quietly. "How can you go someplace like that and not do something? I mean, a man was shot, murdered, right in front of us. How can you just watch that happen and not let it affect you?"

"Who says it doesn't affect me?" the Doctor said in a low voice. "This is why I don't go to fixed points. The temptation to do something is too great." He turned to face him. "This is how I see the world, Mickey. Every second of every day of my life, I see what is, what could be, and what can't. I know what's right, what has to happen, and more importantly, what's wrong and mustn't happen."

"Is that what happened with Madame de Pompadour?"

"Yes. Her death at the hands of futuristic robots was wrong. It couldn't be allowed to happen. I had to stop it. I'm just sorry that you and Rose were hurt by it."

They both fell silent for a moment, and Mickey was overwhelmed by a glimpse of what it meant to be a Time Lord and by a new sense of what life was like for the Doctor, how he must be filled with agonizing choices every day. He didn't know how the other man could handle it, day after day, year after year, and if what Rose said was right, century after century. If it was him, he'd want to escape it. Run away, as far away from all of it as he could.

But the Doctor didn't have that choice.

Finally the silence between them became oppressive.

"We never found out, did we?" Mickey said, mostly to lighten the mood.

"Found out what?"

"What happened. Whether there was a conspiracy. Whether there was a second gunman. We didn't even see who was on the grassy knoll."

The Doctor chuckled. "No, as far as whether there was a conspiracy, whether Oswald acted alone or not, that will have to remain a mystery. But as far as who was on the grassy knoll, I would have thought you'd have figured that out."

"Who?" Mickey asked. And then the penny dropped. "Us?" The Doctor gave him a nod. "But if we changed time by being there, how could it have been us?"

"There may not have been anyone there before," the Doctor told him. "Witnesses were divided about that. Or maybe two other people had been there before who weren't there because we were. Or perhaps there was a ripple effect from our being there. Who knows? Most people consider time to be a straight line, a strict progression of cause to effect, but really it twists and bends, curves and circles upon itself. You can wake up in London in the year 2007 and spend the day creating the seeds of a conspiracy theory in Dallas in 1963."

Mickey shook his head in disbelief.

The Doctor gave him a rueful grin. "Mickey Smith, welcome to time travel."


	12. Chapter 11

**a/n: I am posting this chapter a little earlier than I expected, but it was ready and I'm going to be busy for the next couple of weeks. I am not sure how soon the next chapter will be done, but it shouldn't be too long.**

**I don't usually do trigger warnings on chapters, but I will this time. I'm warning for a discussion of past domestic abuse. It's not particularly graphic or severe, but the discussion is still there. There is also some adult content and swearing.**

* * *

**Chapter Eleven**

As Rose crossed the room to lock up for the evening, John noticed she was moving a little oddly. She was walking slowly, keeping her shoulders square with her body and not turning her head. When she grimaced when she locked the door, he remembered how hard she had hit the wall when Jimmy had pushed her.

"Are you alright?" he asked.

"I'm fine," she said. She looked over her shoulder at him, and a brief look of pain crossed her face. "I'm just a bit sore."

"Go sit down," he ordered.

"I'm fine," she insisted.

John glanced around the office. Not seeing what wanted, he went into the garage and retrieved a tall stool. He set it down right in front of her.

"Sit."

For a moment she looked like she was going to argue, but she sat down. After a brief search of the desk, he grabbed a small torch out of a drawer and returned to her.

"I've got to check your eyes," he told her. "Alright?" He cupped her face in one hand, forcing down the urge to caress the soft skin of her cheek. He had to focus on what he was doing. Flicking the torch on with his thumb, he shined the narrow light in her eyes, one after the other, making sure her reaction was normal. In his concern for her, he didn't bother to wonder how he knew how to examine for a concussion.

"Any nausea?" he asked.

"No."

First setting the torch aside, he moved around her and began to gently prod her back on either side of her spine, working his way upward to her neck and noting where she winced. When he reached the back of her head, she gasped in pain, a quick inhalation of breath that she tried to hide, and he moved to face her.

"You are hurt," he said, "but not too badly. You've got a few bruises, but thankfully it looks like you don't have a concussion. You'll probably be a little sore for a while. Probably more tomorrow than today."

"I'm fine," she insisted. "Believe me, I've been through a lot worse."

He raised an eyebrow. "Now that worries me."

Rose laughed and then winced again. Frowning, John returned to her back. He rubbed his hands together vigorously, creating friction and warming his palms and fingers. Then he moved his hands to the nape of her neck. He hovered his hands there, warming the air between them and her neck.

"Take deep breaths and let them out slowly," he said and then lowered his fingers to her skin.

His fingertips made feather light circles as they traveled up her spine. When he reached her head again, he placed his thumbs four inches apart and firmly pressed on the base of her skull. She let out a quiet sigh as she instantly began to relax.

"What are you doing?" she asked. "That's fantastic."

"Activating pressure points to try to relieve your pain," he answered.

"Well, whatever that is, it's working," she said. He pressed slightly harder, rubbing in tiny circles. She moaned, a sound that in a different context would be absolutely filthy. That thought was accompanied by the realization that he really wanted to make her make that sound again, and in the other context. He took a deep breath to steady himself and forced himself to let up the pressure.

"Oh, don't stop," she said breathlessly. "'S so good."

He returned to massaging the pressure points, and she sighed again. After another minute, he let go of her. "Feeling better?"

"Mmm, yeah. Don't hurt at all anymore."

"That was only a temporary fix. It won't last. You should probably take a couple of paracetamol and have a hot bath before bed. Maybe I should take you home," he suggested.

"Nope, you're not getting out of this that easily," she said. "You said you were gonna take me out, yeah? I'm holding you to it." She grinned at him, with her tongue touching her teeth again, and inside he melted.

Oh, she was going to be trouble.

He grinned back. "Fantastic."

~oOo~

As if he had read her mind, John took her to a café around the corner. It was one her mother almost never went to, and particularly not on a Saturday night. They were sitting at a tiny table in the far corner, the remnants of burgers and chips in front of them. Rose had ordered a pop which was now half empty, while John had opted for a coffee.

While they had been eating, they had made small talk, about movies and telly and work. But after they had both finished, John crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, waiting for her to talk about what had happened in the garage. She was struck by a wave of déjà vu. It was so familiar. That had always been the Doctor's listening position. How many times in the past had the Doctor sat just that way in the TARDIS, waiting for her to open up about something she was reluctant to talk about?

"His name's Jimmy Stone," Rose said. "We met when I was sixteen. A bunch of us went out to a club after finishing the last of our GCSEs, and his band was playing there.

"We started dating right away. A few weeks later I moved in with him and got a job to help with the bills instead of going back to school. Mum was furious. She wasn't particularly keen on me doing A-levels, but she hated Jimmy. To tell the truth, she never thought anyone was good enough for me, but as it turned out she was right about him."

While she spoke, John just listened, expressionless. It was exactly the way the Doctor had reacted the first time she had told him about Jimmy. Despite his disdain for domestics, he'd never judged her for anything she'd told him. That had been their way. Between adventures, they'd talk about all sorts of things. Of course she had always been more forthcoming than he had been, but with a phrase here, a sentence there, slowly she had learned a great deal about him, particularly about the Time War and his role in it. Of course, she hadn't learned about regeneration until after it had happened, and she hadn't learned about his previous companions until after she had met Sarah Jane, but over the time they had traveled together they had learned a lot about one another.

But she had never told him the whole story about Jimmy. She'd never told anyone the whole story, not her friends, not Mickey. Not even her mum.

"At first everything was great. But then the band stopped getting as many gigs and we started having money problems. I was working, but it wasn't enough to make up the difference. He started drinking a lot, and when he got drunk he'd get mean. Every couple of weeks or so, he'd go and get really pissed and then come home and yell at me. He'd call me filthy names and blame me for all our problems: I was too fat, I was too lazy, I wasn't making enough money, I wasn't supportive enough, I was holding him back… When he sobered up, he'd be all apologetic and I'd forgive him and then it'd start all over again.

"Then one night, he came back to the flat and said he was leaving me for a waitress he'd met at one of the clubs where the band had played. A week later I found out he'd stopped paying our bills months earlier and that he was traveling in a caravan with the waitress, trying to make a go of performing solo. Evidently that didn't work out, because last I'd heard he'd ended up in prison." She laughed humorlessly. "Guess he's out now.

"Anyway, then I moved back in with my mum, got the job at Henrik's… Took me almost a year to pay everything off. Then the store blew up."

"Did he ever hit you?" John asked quietly. By now he was leaning forward, elbows on knees, and looking at her intently.

She shook her head. "No. First time he ever touched me was at the garage today."

John didn't respond. Instead he just watched her as if he was waiting for more, and she realized he didn't believe her. She took a deep breath.

"Alright, sometimes he'd push me around like he did in the shop."

His face darkened, and she could see fury radiating off him. It reminded her of her first Doctor. She'd only seen the Doctor look that way a couple of times in her travels with him. Usually when he was angry he'd get sarcastic and flippant but he'd hide the rage that simmered below the surface. When he became angry enough that it showed, it was truly frightening.

But she knew she wasn't the one John was angry with.

"Why did you lie to me?" he asked in a controlled voice.

She looked down, unable to meet his eyes. "Because I was embarrassed," she admitted. She began to spin one of her earrings, something she knew she did when she was nervous or uncomfortable. "He'd do it and then cool off and say he was sorry. And I always forgave him. I should have kicked him out the first time it happened. I was so stupid."

"You should have kicked him out," he agreed. "But you were young, not stupid. You loved him and you wanted to believe him." She nodded.

"It's funny. Over the last couple of years I've faced things a lot more dangerous than Jimmy Stone. But when he was in the office, 's like I went back in time. Like I was that same scared sixteen year old."

"Things that scare us when we're young stay with us a long time, sometimes our whole lives," he said. "It's visceral, instinctive. But I promise you, Rose, he is never, ever going to touch you again." Both his expression and tone were deadly serious, and she could hear the truth in that statement. If it was in his power, he'd make sure it never happened again.

And at that moment she was struck even more strongly by how much John was like her first Doctor. The Doctor had told her that John wasn't him, and she vaguely remembered him saying something about the TARDIS inventing John's history, making him believe he was someone else. She had assumed that it meant he would be a different person. But he wasn't.

John reacted to things the same way the Doctor did. Before she could think about that, he spoke.

"So, what happened next?"

"Next?"

"Yeah, next. After the store blew up."

She had known it was coming, questions about the last couple of years of her life, just as soon as he had wanted to know about Jimmy. Actually she'd known it was coming as soon as they had begun spending time with each other, but now the time was here.

And she still hadn't figured out what to tell him. Not to mention she had no idea what he already knew. Their adventures together hadn't happened for him yet, but that didn't mean he didn't know anything about what she'd been up to for the last year. Two actually, she thought, remembering her missing a year due to them arriving home a year late after their first trip. But that didn't mean he didn't know anything. In fact, he probably knew a fair amount already. After all, gossip was the primary pastime of the Estate.

"A friend of mine and I went traveling for a while," she said. "Now it's your turn."

His eyebrows shot up. "My turn?"

"Yep," she said. "Your turn. I told you about Jimmy, so now it's your turn to tell me something." When he didn't answer immediately she continued. "You know, like how long have you been here, what did you do before you were a mechanic…" He still didn't answer so she lightened her tone. "I'm guessing… that you used to be a banker, but you quit when you lost interest."

He snorted. "Nah, I used to be a carpenter, but then I got bored."

She laughed. "After I read Harry Potter I wanted to be a witch for a spell."

He grinned at her. "I was a train conductor for a while, but that got derailed. Then I worked for a blanket factory, but it folded."

"I used to run marathons, but I couldn't stand the agony of da feet."

"I used to sell Velcro, but I couldn't stick with it."

"I used to sell eyeglasses, but I kept making a spectacle of myself."

"I used to be a doctor, but I kept losing my patients." His grin faded. For a moment a puzzled look crossed his face. He fell silent.

"Actually, to tell the truth, I don't remember what I used to do before I became a mechanic," he said when he finally spoke. "'Bout six months ago I came to in an alley not far from here. Didn't remember anything, not what I was doing there, not even who I was. No money, just the clothes on my back and this in my pocket."

He pulled a slim brown wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans. Before he even handed it to her she recognized it as his psychic paper. She flipped it open and saw what appeared to be a driver's license, complete with his name, address, birthdate and photo. She concentrated for a moment, and the image in front of her wavered and became blank for an instant before snapping back into focus.

"According to that, my name is John Smith and I'm from Manchester. But I wasn't even sure that was right. The name didn't feel like mine for some reason. And I later found out the address is for Old Trafford, the stadium where Manchester United plays, or more specifically, for the entrance to the car park."

She handed the wallet back to him, and he slipped it back in his pocket. "So what did you do?"

"Hitchhiked my way up to Manchester," he said. "Lived rough for a while. Did odd jobs to pay for food. Once I was there, I went to the hospital, the halfway houses, the homeless shelters trying to find out if anyone recognized me or if anyone was looking for me. I searched the missing person records at the police department. I searched old newspaper articles, birth records and death records. I found a number of John Smiths, but none matched my description. I widened my search to the surrounding area, and then to all of the UK. I couldn't find anything. No one with the name John Smith that matched my description.

"A few months ago, I gave up and came back here. Every day since then I've been on the computer, searching everywhere I could think of to try and find some trace of who I am. And I haven't found anything."

John fell silent for a moment, and when he continued his face was expressionless, his voice devoid of emotion. "In six months, I haven't found anyone looking for me. I don't think there's even anyone out there to look. No family, no friends. No one."

Rose leaned forward, grabbed his hand and squeezed it. He looked startled for a moment, as if he had forgotten she was there. Then he met her eyes and squeezed back.

"You've got me now," she told him.

He looked completely gobsmacked. His mouth opened and closed several times as if he was searching for something to say. Finally he gave up and smiled.

And she squeezed his hand again and smiled back.

~oOo~

On the way back to their flats, John could tell that Rose's pain had returned. He had told her that the acupressure was only a temporary fix, and all the benefit she had received had apparently worn off now. She was walking stiffly, holding her head and back almost unnaturally straight. Each step seemed to be an effort for her. He felt a surge of rage towards Jimmy Stone. He had meant it when he had told Rose he'd never let the younger man hurt her again.

As they crossed the street, Rose stumbled and gasped. The sound was like a knife in his gut. The idea that someone could hurt her like that… John fought the urge to just pick her up and carry her back to her flat. Although they hadn't known each other long, he was certain she wouldn't appreciate it.

Instead, they walked back slowly, hand in hand. From the moment she had taken his hand in the café, it felt completely natural to hold her hand, as if her hand was made to fit in his. As if it belonged there.

_A hand in his._

When they arrived back at her building, John offered to walk her up. She shook her head.

"You don't have to do that," she said. "It's not far. I'll be fine." At his skeptical look, she continued. "Seriously. I'll be fine. I'm gonna take your advice and have a good, long soak." She let go of him and walked into the entrance of the stairwell. Then she turned back and gave him a cheeky grin. "Unless you want to scrub my back for me."

John leaned back against the door frame, crossed his arms in front of his chest, and raised an eyebrow at her. "You'd better be careful. I might just take you up on that."

She laughed, and then winced. "Maybe next time."

From the door to his own building, he watched as she walked up the stairs in the glass enclosed stairwell and to her flat, taking note of which one she entered. He had neglected to ask her which one she lived in, and he needed to know if he was going to check on her tomorrow.

That thought, about checking on her, reminded him of someone else he had intended to check on. Rose's run-in with Jimmy Stone had pushed all thoughts of checking on Rita out of his mind. But when he knocked on the door of her flat, there was no answer. Well, it was Saturday night, Rita and Chuck's typical night to go out.

As he entered his own flat, the cat wove around his legs, brushing up against him and purring loudly. Without conscious thought, he fed her and gave her fresh water before returning to his computer. He needed to research someone new.

A piece of shit named Jimmy Stone.

~oOo~

Rose lowered herself into the steaming, bubbly water. It felt almost too hot, perfect to relax sore muscles.

Her mother hadn't been home when she got back to the flat, instead leaving her a note telling her not to expect her until the next morning. Rose was relieved. She was always a little uncomfortable when her mother's boyfriends spent the night. Not to mention she wouldn't have to explain to her mum why she was hurt.

Plus she could spend as much time as she wanted in the tub.

She closed her eyes. Immediately her mind returned to John: John cupping her face as he checked her eyes; John checking her back for bruises; John massaging, almost caressing, the nape of her neck and the back of her head. The Doctor had done that before, but it had always been almost overly clinical as he had examined her. This time it had felt sensual, and here, in the quiet of the bathroom and the privacy of her mind, she could pretend it was erotic.

Her mind wandered, to him coming up with her to the flat. To him scrubbing her back while she was only clothed in bubbles. To hands and lips moving over her, touching and caressing and kissing and tasting. Her hands dropped into the water, her fingertips circling her breasts and moving downward lower and lower until her breath quickened and she was left gasping.

Rose stayed in the bath until the water grew cold. Although the hot water and the painkillers, among other things, had helped relax her and relieve the pain, she was still somewhat shaken over her encounter with Jimmy. Seeing him again brought all those memories of what he would do back in full force: the yelling, the tantrums, the name calling, the shoving… But really, in a weird way he had done her a favor. She had always hated living on the Powell Estate, with people looking down on her because of her address and her accent and her clothes. At the time, seeing him how he really was at the end had been the last straw. It had made her determined to leave someday, to move out of Peckham and run away as far as she could.

By the time she had begun dating Mickey, though, the thought had been pushed to the back of her mind. She had become resigned to living on the Powell Estate for the rest of her life. A life of jobs and telly and beans on toast, as the Doctor said. But it was worse than that. It was always being broke, always having her 'betters' be condescending, always living so close to everyone else that they might have well been in the same room…

But then she had met the Doctor. And turned down his offer to travel with him. The instant he had left she had regretted it, and she had never been more relieved when he had come back.

She'd never thought she'd ever be back here again, not like this. Not working at a boring job and not living with her mother. And particularly not with the Doctor off traveling with Mickey.

It was enough to make her mind spin.

At least John was here.

She dressed in her loosest, most comfortable jimjams and lay down on her bed, thinking about John. Everything he had done today, from the casual flirting with her, to his so easily putting Jimmy on the floor, to his sassiness and awful puns and body language and facial expressions, all was the Doctor she remembered. It was like he was the Doctor, just with a memory loss.

But that's not what the Doctor had told her he'd be like.

Rose tried to remember exactly what the Doctor had said, so she reached over to the bedside table, grabbed the Doctor's hologram cube. She flipped the switch at the bottom, and the hologram of the Doctor began to play again from the beginning.

_"Rose, if you're watching this, it means I've been gone longer than ten seconds…"_

"There's got to be a way to skip some of this," she muttered. She turned it over—and it was a little weird to have the Doctor giving her instructions upside down—and she figured out that by manipulating the switch she was able to fast forward, rewind, and pause the display.

_"C, keep him away from major historical events…"_

"Oops, too far." She pushed the switch in the opposite direction.

_"Now Rose, in this situation there are a number of things to remember…" _

"Here we go," she said.

_"First of all, like I said before, he's not me. Well, he is, but in all the important ways he isn't. The TARDIS will have given him a completely new identity, and he will believe that that's who he is…"_

She rewound it so she could listen to it again.

_"…he's not me. Well, he is, but in all the important ways he isn't. The TARDIS will have given him a completely new identity, and he will believe that that's who he is…"_

She repeated it again.

_"The TARDIS will have given him a completely new identity…"_

She paused the hologram. "But the TARDIS didn't give him a new identity," she told the Doctor's image. "And he doesn't know who he is." She groaned. "Now what do I do?"

After debating for a moment, she grabbed her mobile.

_"You've reached the TARDIS,"_ said a familiar voice with a Northern accent. _"If I'm not here, you've probably got the wrong number. But if this is Rose, and we got separated because you wandered off again, I'm probably already on my way to find you. And if this Jack, no, you can't bring your latest… whatever… back to the TARDIS. Go back to his or her or its place. And if you're in jail, cool off, sober up, and I'll come and get you in the morning."_

Rose stared at her mobile in shock. She'd never phoned the TARDIS and had the call not go to her proper timeline. She tried again, and she received the same message.

She rewound the message on the cube and played it from the beginning.

_"Rose, if you're watching this, it means I've been gone longer than ten seconds. I'm really sorry about that. I truly meant to come back in ten seconds. All I can say is that maybe whatever is going on with his TARDIS is beginning to affect mine."_

She had thought that the reason he was late was just because he was a lousy driver, but maybe there was more to it. If there were problems with the TARDIS, who knew how long he'd be gone.

Or if he'd even be able to get back.

Her mind raced. If she couldn't phone the TARDIS, how could she tell the Doctor that the TARDIS hadn't provided his previous incarnation with an identity? If there was only some way to get a message to him…

She slapped her forehead. "Stupid! I could try to phone Mickey on his mobile!"

She dialed, and at the same time her mum's phone rang.

"Mum must have forgotten her mobile again," she said aloud. As she began to search for her mother's phone, she disconnected the call to Mickey. Her mum's phone stopped ringing.

She rolled her eyes. "Isn't that always the way?" She speed-dialed Mickey again, and the phone began to ring in the other room again. She disconnected, and the ringing stopped.

With a sense of dread, she dialed Mickey again, and the ringing began again. This time she left the connection open, and she traced the source of the ringing to the lounge. The phone was buried in the space between the cushion and the back of one of the imitation leather chairs in front of the television.

That had been the chair Mickey had sat in when they'd had pizza with her mother last week. He must have lost it while he'd been watching telly. The phone ringing had been Mickey's, not her mum's.

"Shit!"

She was stuck on the Estate with no way to contact the Doctor if there was a problem. She was on her own.

No, she wasn't. John was here. And no matter what the Doctor said, even though he didn't remember, even though he was human, John _was_ the Doctor.

She was sure of it.


	13. Chapter 12

**a/n: Sorry this chapter has taken so long to finish, particularly because it is so short. There were a lot of reasons for that that I won't go into here, but let's just say RL and writer's block were two of the more significant ones.**

**I'm not sure when the next chapter will be ready. It's already started, but again, RL has been crazy lately.**

**A final note. This chapter turned out a lot differently than originally planned and ended up including a couple of unexpected cameos from a couple of characters I've never written before. I hope I did them justice.**

* * *

**Chapter Twelve**

John frowned as he stared thoughtfully at his computer monitor. He had spent hours researching Rose's ex-boyfriend, Jimmy Stone, and what he had found disturbed him.

The stupid ape had been brought up on the Brandon Estate, one that was not too far from the Powell Estate. Single mother, absentee father, barely passed his GCSEs. Formed a band called Shriek with three other blokes: Christopher Neely, Charles Samson, and Reginald Taylor. Lead singer and guitarist, reportedly talented but had frequent run-ins with the local police over drugs, public drunkenness, and brawling.

Attempted a solo career, short-lived. Arrested on charges of domestic violence (not against Rose), charges later dropped. Arrested for robbing a pub he had been playing at. Convicted and sent to prison for three years. Recently released.

The thought of this man anywhere near Rose sickened him. She had told him that Jimmy had verbally abused her and pushed her around when they were together. He had no doubt she had told him the truth, as far as it went, but he just hoped that there wasn't more to the story than she had let on.

Although he had warned Rose's ex-boyfriend to stay away from her, he had no confidence that the younger man would actually leave her alone. He'd have watch out for him. There was no way he'd let Jimmy hurt her again.

For a moment he wished he had a time machine so he could go back in time and stop Jimmy from hurting her, or from even meeting her in the first place. Then he snorted at the thought.

"Me with a time machine," he said, shaking his head. "I must be losin' it."

~oOo~

The morning after going to Dallas, Mickey had a quick breakfast before making his way to the console room.

The trip to the Kennedy assassination the day before had been disturbing to say the least, but once back on the TARDIS the horror of what he had witnessed quickly faded and he began yawning loudly. The Doctor had sent him to get some food and some sleep, saying he would need it before their next stop. He himself would work on the TARDIS while Mickey rested. Evidently Time Lords didn't need as much sleep as mere humans.

Completely knackered, Mickey had been grateful for the break between adventures. Although he'd never admit that to the Doctor. The arrogant git.

As Mickey entered the room, the Doctor called, "Careful where you step."

Several sections of the metal grating surrounding the console had been removed and set to the side, revealing a number of compartments for storage and for accessing various portions of the TARDIS's circuitry. The Doctor was lying on his stomach, his right arm shoulder deep within one of them as if he were reaching for something. Mickey could hear the whirr of the Doctor's sonic screwdriver coming from somewhere underneath him.

"What are you doing?"

"Trying to override the space-time redundancy limiter. It's preventing us from landing at our next destination."

"Hitting it with a mallet isn't enough this time?"

To Mickey's surprise, the Doctor took his mocking comment seriously. He shut off the screwdriver and sat up.

"No, in this case the mallet won't help. She not only doesn't want to land, she is programmed not to land. I have to rewire her circuitry to override it."

"Where are we going that she's programmed not to land?"

"To the Titanic launch. That's the next stop on our list. Well, it's either that or Krakatoa, and with the way the TARDIS is acting up, I don't want to risk an exploding volcano if we don't have to."

"I don't get it," Mickey said. "What's so special about the Titanic that the TARDIS is programmed not to go there?"

"It has nothing to do with the Titanic," the Doctor told him. "It's that she's programmed not to land somewhere where I already am. Usually I can persuade her to do it anyway if necessary—"

"Like you _persuaded_ her last time?"

"But this is different," the Doctor continued as if Mickey hadn't spoken. "I'm already there."

"Yeah, but isn't that the point of us going? Because you already went?"

"This is different," the Doctor said again. "When I went, I was already there. I remember being there."

"I thought you said you didn't remember going," Mickey said.

"I don't remember going," the Doctor said. "Not after I met Rose." He let out a huff of irritation. "Why on Earth would I go there of all places? I had to know the risk. I was already there, and I knew it."

"What do you mean you were already there?"

"I was already there when I went," he told them. "And if the two of us go, I'll be there three times."

Mickey's eyes widened when he suddenly realized what the Doctor meant. "You mean you were there before…"

"Yep."

"And then you went again…"

"Yep."

"And now you're goin' the same place and time for the third time?"

"Yep."

Mickey laughed nervously. "What could happen if you're there three times?"

"I don't know."

"Well, you know what they say," Mickey said. "Three times the charm, yeah?"

"They also say 'bad things happen in threes.'"

~oOo~

Rose placed Mickey's mobile on a nearby table before sinking down on the chair and staring at her own. She was certain the Doctor needed to know that the TARDIS hadn't given John a new identity in order to figure out what was wrong. But how could she tell him if she couldn't even phone him?

"Now what?" she said aloud. Her brow furrowed in frustration and puzzlement. "Doctor, what do I do?"

When after several moments no ideas presented themselves, she impulsively speed-dialed the TARDIS again in hopes of the call reaching her current Doctor this time. After all, she told herself, if she reached the other Doctor's answer phone again, she could just ring off as she had before.

But she didn't reach her Doctor in pinstripes, nor did she reach the earlier Doctor's answer phone.

"_Rose, where are you?"_ her first Doctor asked.

Never forgetting the possibility of reapers, her first instinct was to immediately disconnect before she spoke. But she didn't. The temptation of talking to the Doctor, either Doctor, who actually remembered that he was the Doctor, was too strong.

"Um…"

_"__I told you I'm not comin' for tea," _he said firmly_._

Rose blinked._ Tea?_

_"__I was just about to call you anyway," _he continued without allowing her to answer_. "I thought you'd be here by now. I'm done repairing the TARDIS temporal vector relay. It's time to go."_

"Go?" she asked.

_"__Yeah, we've got to get goin'." _After a moment's silence he continued, his voice soft and low. It was devoid of emotion. Rose knew from long experience that that was the way he got when he felt hurt._ "Did you change your mind about the plasma storm?"_

"Plasma storm?" she asked, scanning her memory. They had been to a number of plasma storms since they had begun traveling together.

_"__Yeah, the plasma storm in the Horsehead Nebula_," he said. _"We just talked about going a couple of hours ago. Are you alright?"_

She suddenly remembered which plasma storm he was talking about. They had gone right after that first trip home to see her mother. "No. I mean yes," she said, quickly correcting herself. "I'm fine, and I haven't changed my mind. I'll be there soon. Probably already on the way."

_"__Probably?" _he asked, his voice laced with amusement.

_Oops. Shouldn't have said probably_, she thought.

"I've got to go… got to finish getting ready, yeah? Be there soon."

_"__Don't be late. I'm not gonna wait forever, y'know."_

Despite the seriousness of the situation, she smiled at the empty threat. For all his gruff words, he had always waited for her.

"See you soon," she promised.

After she rang off, she stared again at her mobile. Instead of reaching her current Doctor, or even her first Doctor while they had been traveling with Jack, that call had been routed to a time early in their relationship, only days after they had begun traveling together in fact. There had to be something seriously wrong with the TARDIS. She had known that there was something wrong with the TARDIS from the moment it had brought them here, but she had had no idea the extent of the problem. And neither did the Doctor.

Her mind returned to the conversation she had just had. In his timeline, it had happened only days after they had begun traveling together...

Could she somehow warn him there was something wrong? Would she be creating a paradox if she warned him?

Or would she be preventing one?

And even if she did manage to warn him without creating a paradox, would it be too late to do any good? As John, the Doctor was in that tiny amount of time between him meeting her and them traveling together. She'd have to warn the Doctor there was a problem after she'd met him but before the TARDIS had used the chameleon arch on him for it to do any good. A tiny sliver of time, and there was no guarantee that she'd reach him then.

She bit her lip as she continued to stare at her mobile. Should she risk it?

Did she dare not to?

"God, what do I do? What do I do?"

After running through all the possible things that could go wrong – primarily paradoxes and reapers – she decided she had to risk it.

"I'll just be real careful, yeah?" she said to herself. "Tell him something's wrong without giving him too much information. Let him take it from there."

Before she could change her mind, she took a deep breath and rang the TARDIS again. In her ear she could hear the phone ring one, two, three times before it was answered.

_"__This is the Doctor. Who is this please?"_

Rose's eyes widened in shock. Her heart pounded. She didn't recognize the voice.

The person – _the Doctor _– on the other end of the connection had a posh accent. She knew the Doctor could regenerate, and after meeting Sarah Jane she knew that the older woman had traveled with an incarnation that she, Rose, had never met.

She knew the TARDIS was having problems linking her mobile to her proper timeline, but it hadn't occurred to her she could end up accidentally ringing a Doctor she didn't know.

_"__Hello? Hello?"_

"Sorry, wrong number," she said and quickly disconnected the call.

"Oh, god," she said. She swallowed hard. "Well, that was a mistake."

~oOo~

Ten thousand years and countless light years away, the TARDIS hung in the open, empty space between galaxies. Despite being the same TARDIS that Rose traveled in, she would have found it almost unrecognizable. Unlike the coral walls, metal floor gratings, and beat up leather jump seat she was used to, the walls of the console room were marble and lined with bookcases containing a variety of classic leather-bound works from dozens of planets. Paintings by da Vinci, Manet, and Renoir, and statues by Michelangelo and Donatello adorned the room. Priceless Oriental rugs lay atop floors made from English oak. An ancient phonograph, a chess set (with a game in progress), and Tiffany lamps sat on antique tables. Completing the décor were comfortable upholstered chairs and settees that looked like they would be more at home in a stately English manor than an alien time machine.

The central console, made of a dark wood, was almost unrecognizable as well. It was surrounded by arching metal struts which met high overhead and helped support the tall glass column that held the time rotor. The rotor itself glowed purplish blue, adding to the glow provided by the lamps and the flickering yellow light from candelabras placed strategically around the room.

At the console stood two people, a young blonde woman in a full length burgundy gown and a man with chestnut, shoulder-length locks wearing a silk cravat and a velvet jacket in a deep red. The man stared thoughtfully at an old fashioned telephone receiver in his hand.

"Who was that, Doctor?" the woman asked.

"I don't know, Charley," the Doctor responded. "I didn't recognize her voice."

"Her?"

The Doctor ignored, or perhaps didn't even notice, the slight hint of jealousy in her voice. "Yes, her," he said. "A young woman, probably from 21st century London based on her accent and the sound of her voice. But the question is not 'who is she' but how did she manage to ring the TARDIS?" He chuckled. "She said she had a wrong number, but that's impossible. It's impossible to ring the TARDIS without her approval." He paused for a moment, considering the problem. "Perhaps she's a companion of mine."

"But wouldn't you know who she was if she had been a companion of yours?"

The Doctor's mouth twisted into a small, ironic smile. "Not necessarily. But it's possible she's not a past companion but a future one." He replaced the telephone receiver and looked up at Charley. "But if she's a future one, best not think too long on it. I don't want to accidentally cause a paradox."

She snorted. "No, if _you_ create a paradox, you want to do it on purpose."

He grinned at her. "Quite right."


End file.
